Tiaras at the ready: after a two-year wait, we’re finally back in the ballroom for a third season of Bridgerton. And much to fans’ delight, in a deviation from Julia Quinn’s novels, this season will focus on the romance between Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) and Colin (Luke Newton), or ‘Polin’, as the fandom has affectionately dubbed them.
‘Everybody wants to watch romance. There’s a thirst for it,’ says Claudia Jessie, who plays the wonderfully acerbic, proto-feminist Eloise Bridgerton, Penelope’s (former) BFF. ‘When you add the backdrop of the early 1800s, there are horses and carts and balls and beautiful dresses, which just bolster the romance. You can really float away and dream with it.’
As well as romance, the new season delivers all the sauciness we’ve become accustomed to (see: that iconic spoon- licking scene) – expect candlelit threesomes and illicit shenanigans in the back of a carriage. Following in the footsteps of season one and two heart-throbs Regé-Jean Page and Jonathan Bailey, Newton takes up the mantle, with Colin having something of a glow-up, arriving back from Europe with a thrilling new bad-boy vibe. ‘Newts,’ as Claudia calls her co-star, ‘feels like my brother – but I’m ready for everybody to fall in love with him.’
As Bridgerton’s resident rebel, Eloise is something of a fan favourite. ‘She is defiant, quick-witted. She’s got her idea of what she wants for her life. And it’s not really based around marriage and romance at all at the moment.’ Three seasons in, ‘I still get nervous before every take,’ says Jessie. ‘I put a lot of effort in. I learn the living daylights out of my lines.’
We find Eloise in a vulnerable place, having fallen out with Penelope on discovering – spoiler alert! – that she is in fact gossip queen Lady Whistledown. ‘She’s lost her best friend, her rock, her everything really, so she feels very alone, very hurt and betrayed,’ says Jessie, who is good friends with Coughlan IRL. With their on-screen friendship in tatters ‘now we’re mostly filming barneys. We both enjoy it; it’s great for us to flex a different muscle and show a different side to both girls. So we do have fun but, when we do those scenes, we’ll have a cuddle afterwards.’
Bridgerton is a bona fide star-making machine – catapulting the careers of heroines Phoebe Dynevor and Simone Ashley to new heights. Having spent 12 years grafting, with various TV roles under her belt, 34-year-old Jessie in unequivocal: ‘Eloise is the best thing that’s ever happened to me; she is my favourite person on the planet. And she’s not even real!’ The hardest part of her career path, she says, was ‘getting into the industry. I’m working class. It’s difficult. But once the ball started rolling it just kept on rolling.’
She is vocal about the need for better access – ‘67% of British Oscar-winners are privately educated, yet under 5% of the British population were privately educated: now I’m not amazing at maths, but that doesn’t sound good’ – and champions Open Door, a non-profit run by actor David Mumeni that helps young people without financial support to break into the industry.
How has she weathered the ups and downs of acting? ‘I don’t want to get too woo-woo but I was raised Buddhist. I’m one of the noisy Buddhists,’ she adds. ‘I chant. Same as Tina Turner. I think that’s helped me. And not being on social media.’ There are shades of Eloise in Jessie, she admits. ‘I’ve lost any desire to appear “normal” or “good”; I think we share that,’ she says. ‘But I’m nowhere near as cool as Eloise.’