Bridgerton season four: Yerin Ha on romance, fans and being mad at Benedict

Romance can’t be dead, surely?

Despite the reports of heterosexual women swearing off love and men, and American teenagers preferring to watch stories about friendship, that thrum of swoons and hearts all aflutter still pushes on.

Especially on Bridgerton. Especially now.

“I like to think romance never left,” Yerin Ha, the Australian star of the series’ fourth season, told The Nightly. “I like to believe that the craving for romance has been the same. Maybe it’s different in different periods.

“Maybe it’s been stronger post-pandemic or during the pandemic or right now, when I feel the world is very divided at the moment with a lot of hate.

“Romance should still be taken as a very serious genre. Same with literature. We’ve had books that talk about love and different tropes of love since the beginning of time. It never left but maybe people crave it more right now.”

Is a TV romance a balm for all that discord? Can we step outside of the cacophony and, for a moment, lose ourselves in a fantasy?

“At the end of it, it’s all about connection,” Ha continued. “I loved love stories since I was a kid. I watched Sound of Music, I was obsessed with that film, I was obsessed with rom-coms when I was a teenager, and K-drama Secret Garden.

“That was when I was really trying to understand celebrity crushes, that this is what it feels like to have a celebrity crush.”

Bridgerton is a big moment for the Sydney-born Ha, who nabbed the co-lead role in one of the most popular shows of the streaming era.

A NIDA graduate who had been in a Sydney Theatre Company production of Lord of the Flies with Eliza Scanlen and Mia Wasikowska, Ha starred in local shows such as Troppo and Bad Behaviour and also international series including Halo and Dune: Prophecy.

But those shows are not Bridgerton. Still, Ha said she tried to approach it like any other work, even with the extra pressure and the scale of the fandom. And she’s still not getting noticed on the street – “I don’t know if I ever will, I think there’s something in my brain that’s just blocking it”.

There’s no doubt that romances trigger something different among its fandoms, a kind of wish fulfilment or projection that heightens the response. Not all fans, but definitely a segment, who literally feels the flush of the charged story they see on experience.

Heated Rivalry, the buzzy Canadian series about two closeted gay hockey players who fall in lust and then love over a number of years, in secret, have really provoked something in the audience, most of them straight women.

But there’s another side to it beyond a bit of fun, where actors have been harassed and even threatened for essentially bursting the bubble of the fictional story. Some people either can’t or really don’t want to separate truth from fantasy.

Sometimes that blurring is something publicity and marketing departments deliberately play up, suggesting that there is a special bond, albeit not necessarily amorous, between the actors in real life, which makes the fictional story even more essential.

We saw it with the Wicked press tour and we’re seeing it now with the Wuthering Heights one, with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi declaring their co-dependency on each other.

It’s not a publicity tactic Bridgerton has ever really resorted to. Perhaps it’s confident that with romance as its raison d’etre, it doesn’t need to.

Ha and her onscreen paramour Luke Thompson, who plays Benedict Bridgerton, are obviously paired together on the Bridgerton promo tour, but there are no calculated grazings of each other’s arms or strange comments.

“Luke is a dear, dear friend, I adore him as a friend,” Ha said. “We worked together for a very intense period of time for nine, 10 months. But I can’t control what people project onto us but my friendship with him offscreen is different to what’s onscreen. It’s about being genuine, and my love for Luke as a friend is genuine.”

Ha was magnanimous in postulating that perhaps in a strange way, the fact some fans can’t separate fact from fiction is “potentially a compliment” to actors such as Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie because the performers were able to be so convincing on screen.

“(Those fans) are obviously so immersed in what’s been portrayed and they see that character rather than the person.

“But it’s a little bit scary with social media, and when you root for such a love story and a pairing you want to see, and it becomes hard for people to separate it.

“They should be able to differentiate an actor from the character. It’s a very strange thing to navigate.

“I’m not sure what there is to do except remind people in a gentle, polite way, that we are also humans and we don’t owe an explanation about what we do with our personal lives. Our private lives and our public-facing selves are very different.

“It is an interesting time when people feel like they have the right to be able to say what they want about you, but I think we should be able to just give more grace to people.”

Because Bridgerton is one of Netflix’s most high-profile series, the fourth season will be released in two batches. The first four episodes came out last week with the next half slated for the end of February.

Not dropping everything at once allows for Bridgerton fans to take this moment and really unpack and get into what they’ve seen so far of the story of Benedict and Ha’s Sophie, which draws heavily from Cinderella.

Sophie is a servant to her not-nice stepmother and her two adult daughters, and one night with the help of the other staff, sneak off to a masked ball in which she catches the eye of Benedict, but runs away before she reveals to him who she is, leaving behind a single silver glove.

Spoilers for the first four episodes of season four ahead

Over the next few chapters, Sophie and the aristocratic Benedict meet again – he still doesn’t know she’s the mysterious Silver Lady – and there is obvious sparkage between them.

They both try to fight their chemistry for each other due to their different social statuses but ultimately succumb to a heated encounter on the back stairs. He asks her, “will you be my mistress?”. It’s not what Sophie wanted to hear, and it certainly wasn’t the audience wanted to hear.

The online reaction has fervently been on Sophie’s side, excoriating Benedict for his choice of words.

“It’s been hilarious,” Ha said. “Internet memes is the place that I thrive. It’s cracking me up.”

But, she said, she’s trying to not get too deep into it, but from what she’s seen, some of which she has re-shared to her own Instagram profile, is that people are very angry at Benedict.

“And rightly so! I was angry too,” she said.

“But I do want to remind people that the context is that it was the 1800s, and the class disparity, what it looks like between two people, one from a lower class and one from the upper class, almost never happened.

“Being with a maid with ruin a family’s reputation, ruining potential opportunities for the younger siblings.”

She also said that for Sophie, being a mistress isn’t just a matter of pride or defiance through a modern lens. “It’s more of an emotional problem for her, a reminder of her (mistress) mother, her identity and how she’s had to live her life for the past years.”

But the online conversation, the memes, the thinkpieces and the takes, that’s the stuff of gold, that’s the stuff of fandom.

“That’s where art really thrives, through the conversation and dialogue. It’s a really, really exciting time to be in TV and art. It’s fun.”

Bridgerton is streaming on Netflix with season four part two to premiere on February 26