People tend to frown when Luke Thompson compares “Bridgerton” to Shakespeare.
But the British actor, who leads the latest season of Netflix’s blockbuster romance show and has been performing the Bard’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 realize, Thompson said.
The upcoming season of “Bridgerton” seems to strengthen his argument. In this fourth installment, which comes to Netflix on Jan. 29, 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.”
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 favorite: 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 following her father’s death, unlike many of the women clamoring for Benedict’s hand. She is independent-minded enough to hold Benedict to account for his libertine behavior — something that terrifies his character, Thompson said.
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 first take center stage.
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.”
When Newton was preparing to lead Season 3 as Colin, he asked the previous male leads for guidance, but that wasn’t Thompson’s style. “Luke was always ready to do this,” Newton said. “I knew that he just didn’t need any advice.”
Newton added that, on set, he looked to Thompson as a model well before his character was a lead. From the first season, “Luke was amazing at incorporating a modern-day physicality into this Regency-style performance,” Newton said, “which paved the way for me into how I was going to use physicality in my performance.”
The only tips Newton said he had for Thompson were around juggling the new commitments that come with being a “Bridgerton” colead. Those include the show’s notoriously extensive promotional campaign.
“I hate talking about myself,” Thompson said over coffee on his second day of promo for Season 4. “So doing this is a challenge — but a good challenge.”
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 “destabilizing 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 6, 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 theater 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 program 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 Theater 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 modernize, or not to modernize, 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.”
That chimes with the approach of Robert Icke, the British director whose “Oedipus” is currently on Broadway starring Mark Strong and Lesley Manville.
Thompson and Icke first worked together on the “Oresteia” in 2015, and Thompson later played Laertes in Icke’s “Hamlet,” with Andrew Scott in the title role. Icke said Thompson’s nuanced perspective on Laertes’ motivations toward the end of the play “became so important, I think, to our view of the whole picture.”
Thompson isn’t an actor who is motivated by gaining recognition or becoming a brand ambassador, Icke said. 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.”
He would like to try acting in French and find a role that lets him play piano. He would love to play Hamlet, or Iago. But there’s time.
“I’m in this for the long haul,” Thompson said. “I just want to keep going, and keep exploring. I hope I’ll still be acting into my 80s.”
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