People tend to frown when Luke Thompson compares Bridgerton to Shakespeare.
But this British actor, who leads the latest season of Netflix’s blockbuster romance show and has been performing Shakespeare’s plays for more than a decade, was resolute in an interview at a London hotel: “In its essence, Bridgerton has a very Shakespearean sensibility,” he said.
Both deal in heightened reality and both have used historical settings – onscreen, Britain’s Regency era; in plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ancient Athens – to explore contemporary concerns, said the actor, 37.
Like the string quartet playing pop hits on Bridgerton, Shakespeare’s writing, in its day, was “much more populist, as well as accessible” than today’s audiences, adjusting to the iambic pentameter, often realise, Thompson said.
The new season of Bridgerton seems to strengthen his argument.
In this fourth instalment, Thompson’s character Benedict Bridgerton falls for a maid pretending to be a lady at a dreamlike masked ball.
“That comedy of meeting in disguise,” Thompson said, is also “very Shakespeare.”
Keeping romance alive
Finding common ground between hallowed literary texts and one of our time’s buzziest streaming shows is characteristic of the curiosity Thompson brings to his work.
That includes playing Benedict, which was one of his “first proper screen roles” when he was cast in 2019, he said.
His character has long been a fan favourite: the charming second son who provides a foil to his serious older brother Anthony, played by Jonathan Bailey, and moral support to his feminist-minded younger sister Eloise.
Outside the family home, Benedict enjoys parties, artistic pursuits and sexual fluidity.
By the beginning of the fourth season, he has been indulging in these pleasures so much his mother accuses him of becoming a rake.
To the striving society of mothers and debutante daughters, this doesn’t lessen his appeal on the marriage market.
“What really matters is his surname,” one pushy mother tells her daughters, adding that, anyway, “everyone knows reformed rakes make the best husbands.”
But the Bridgerton siblings are in the market for true love (which, on the show, also inevitably leads to marriage).
In Season 4, we see Benedict contemplating finally making a commitment to wed after his masked ball meet-cute.
“Benedict’s plight is like a lot of people’s plight nowadays,” Thompson said, “which is that you do have to make a choice.”
The mysterious woman at the ball, Sophie (Yerin Ha), was the daughter of an earl, but has been supporting herself after her father’s death, unlike many of the women clamouring for Benedict’s hand.
She is independent-minded enough to hold Benedict to account for his libertine behaviour – something that terrifies his character, Thompson said.
The main man
When he’s not flitting around town, viewers get insight into Benedict’s emotions during his heart-to-hearts with Eloise, played by Claudia Jessie, on the swings in the family garden.
From the first time they shot one such swing scene, Jessie said that acting opposite Thompson “didn’t really feel like work”.
The pair have been playing Bridgertons, intermittently, for seven years now, and in that time, the actors have grown with their characters, Jessie said.
Thompson “really cares about the craft of acting, more than I can say I do,” she said, which “I always find quite romantic.”
A different Bridgerton sibling’s love story anchors each season, based on the romance novels of the American author Julia Quinn.
Following the books, Season 3 should have had Benedict’s story in focus, but in what could be seen as typical for a second son, it was delayed so that the growing romance between Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) and the third Bridgerton brother, Colin (Luke Newton) could be explored first.
Now, it’s finally Benedict’s turn.
“We were all very excited to do his season,” said Tom Verica, a Bridgerton producer and director, “because for so long he’s been the playful comic relief while the focus was on other people.”
Understanding oneself
In conversation Thompson was warm and especially expansive when discussing the craft of acting.
With the new attention Season 4 would bring, he had been thinking about how to protect both his personal life, Thompson said, as well as “the actual job I want to do, which is be other people.”
Had this sort of leading turn come when he was 20, “I probably wouldn’t be alive,” Thompson said with a wry laugh.
That age was a “destabilising time,” he added: He had just moved back to Britain after a childhood and adolescence spent just outside Paris.
Thompson took piano lessons from age of six, and because his parents – an engineer and a teacher – are British, “I spoke English, but I was sort of half-at-home at English, and half-not,” the actor said. “I was very French.”
In England, people expected him to know cultural references he just didn’t, and so Thompson had to “fill in a language that wasn’t mine, and make it mine.”
“I guess that’s acting, isn’t it?” he said. “Taking words that aren’t yours and making them yours.”
Thompson spent a year on a theatre course in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s hometown, before studying English and drama at Bristol University.
“Ever since I’ve been young, I think being on a stage or in front of a group of people, simultaneously hiding and revealing things, is perfect,” Thompson said.
Still, committing to acting was a “slow process”, he said.
He had applied unsuccessfully to drama school before college, but in his senior year, he decided to try one more time, and was accepted onto a three-year programme at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. (In the end, “I studied too much,” he said.)
His first job was at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.
“It was such a revelation,” he said, “that ‘Wow, these plays can actually be fun and funny.’”
Since being cast on Bridgerton, Thompson has bounced between filming seasons and high-profile stage roles, including Willem in Ivo van Hove’s A Little Life in the West End and Berowne in a recent Royal Shakespeare Company production of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
In the ongoing debates over whether to modernise, or not to modernise, Shakespeare, Thompson is firmly in the former camp.
“They’re amazing plays,” he said, “but you need to be allowed to snip them, and cut them, and arrange them so they can still speak to people.”
But whether he’s among the wisteria-covered houses on Bridgerton, or onstage in Shakespeare, Thompson said that acting was “a way that I understand myself, and try to understand myself.”
It was, he added, “glowing, scintillating proof of the fact that we’re not just imprisoned by our experience.” – @2026 The New York Times Company
All four seasons of Bridgerton are available on Netflix.
