Bridgerton: New Lady Whistledown mystery, Francesca’s grief and the sex-scene debate
Bridgerton’s latest turn of events—highlighted by a headline asking "Who Is the New Lady Whistledown After that Shocking Bridgerton Season 4 Twist?"—lands as Season 4, Part 2 has debuted on Netflix, and the show’s creative changes have left cast and critics unpacking new character choices and intimate scenes.
Bridgerton’s new mystery: Who is Lady Whistledown now?
A recent headline posed the question of the new Lady Whistledown after a shocking Season 4 twist. This installment of the series arrives while discussion swirls over which character holds the gossip pen, and the drama in Part 2 has prompted fresh speculation among viewers. This installment contains spoilers for Season 4 of Bridgerton.
Hannah Dodd’s unexpected path to Francesca
Hannah Dodd, 30, says she auditioned "quite intensely" for the first season to play Daphne Bridgerton but lost the role to Phoebe Dynevor. A few years later she was invited to film a self-tape for a "very secretive" project and had no idea it was Bridgerton again. Dodd spoke at London’s 180 House in mid-February, where the interviewers selected a remote table at the members club to avoid overhearing spoilers; she noted that Part 2 of Season 4 debuted on Netflix on Thursday.
Several months passed before Dodd learned the project was Bridgerton. "Part of me was like, ‘Oh, do I want to go through that again?’" she said, adding that she "genuinely loved the material. " A few days later she met with the team at Shondaland, and "a week after that I was at piano lessons. " Showrunner Jess Brownell spoke later over Zoom from Los Angeles about the casting search: "We had seen hundreds of people and no one had felt quite right. We saw Hannah really late in the process and we instantly knew. She is such a subtle actor. She’s able to play shyness without seeming weak and you sense she has an inner strength that’s waiting to blossom, which was really necessary for a character who starts out in Season 3 as quite shy and reserved. But from this season and beyond, she’s a character who goes through quite a bit and is going to have a fierceness to her to survive it. "
Francesca and John: marriage, Scotland and abrupt grief
Dodd was cast as Francesca Bridgerton for Season 3, replacing Ruby Stokes, who played the role in the first two seasons and departed due to scheduling issues. Dodd said she felt pressure joining the established Bridgerton family but that the cast made her feel at home. The events surrounding Francesca in the first four seasons largely exist before those in Julia Quinn’s novel When He Was Wicked, known among fans as "Francesca’s book. "
In Season 3 Francesca made her debut into the Ton and found an unexpected connection with John Stirling, the Earl of Kilmartin, played by Victor Alli. By the beginning of Season 4 the couple have married and settled in his London home; in Part 2, John tragically dies. Dodd noted, "People who have read the books understand that none of what they’ve seen so far happens in the books. You don’t get to see her on the marriage mart. In Chapter 1 of her book, John dies and her story starts after that. " Brownell added, "John’s alive for about 10 pages of the book and then there’s a time jump, so we’re not spending a ton of time in what her immediate grief feels like. But it’s enough that we had some clues from Julia Quinn about how she might react. " Almost all of Francesca’s story so far has been imagined by the show’s writers.
How the new sex scenes stack up to previous seasons
Sex Reviews—where writers offer a sober critical assessment of sex scenes—returned to the world of Violet and Edmund Bridgerton, a couple who had eight children and named them in alphabetical order. The column notes that Netflix continues to add seasons as each Bridgerton child’s story is explored; Season 4, Part 2 is streaming on Netflix a month after Part 1 debuted.
The column focuses on Benedict Bridgerton, the second son, played by Luke Thompson, who has been notable for aimlessness compared with his eldest brother Anthony, played by Jonathan Bailey. Benedict picked up painting and sketching and then dropped it; he figures out he is interested in both men and women—an invention of the show that is not present in the Julia Quinn novels—and has been seen drinking often, late at night, with a bohemian crowd. At the beginning of Season 4, Violet, played by Ruth Gemmell, is in despair over her son’s future, and the Queen herself wants Benedict to marry.
Benedict meets Sophie, played by Yerin Ha, a maid and the illegitimate child of a deceased lord who sneaks into a masked ball dressed in borrowed finery; the two connect and are separated at midnight. Most of the season is spent on logistics: getting the lovebirds back in the same place, Benedict discovering Sophie’s true backstory, and the couple figuring out how to make a marriage work.
Rebecca Onion and Nadira Goffe, veterans of the Sex Reviews column, had given Season 3’s sex scenes a 4 of 10 and the Queen Charlotte spinoff a 3 of 10. Nadira Goffe singled out the first hot moment of Season 4 as the brief sex scene between Francesca and her new husband, Lord John Stirling, Earl of Kilmartin. Their romance began in Season 3 when the two introverts bonded over reserved moments like shared silences; by the end of that season they had married and moved to John’s native Scotland. In the Part 2 scene, Goffe writes, the camera opens on John on top of Francesca, "slowly thrusting and moaning, " while Francesca lies there with a pleasant, if uninspired, smile. For John the interaction is "very nice, " but the scene reads as a simple, run-of-the-mill engagement for Francesca.
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