Penelope and Colin’s steamy Bridgerton season 3 trysts led actors Nicola Coughlan and Luke Newton to break a piece of furniture.
Speaking to BuzzFeed UK ahead of the Netflix premiere, Newton, 31, didn’t “know if [they] can say” further details without spoiling the scene. Coughlan, 37, then offered a few tidbits about the moment.
“It’s not a bed,” she teased. “Someone [previously guessed] candlestick. I [was] like, ‘What do you think we’re doing?’ I would say it’s like a piece of furniture you would more see in the past than in the present.”
Coughlan added, “Yeah, we did break it during a sexy scene because we were really going for it. We thought, ‘This was so hot.’”
Coughlan and Newton are the season 3 leads and fans will see their friends-to-lovers romance play out upon the May 16 season premiere. Penelope and Colin’s love story was adapted from Julia Quinn’s Romancing Mister Bridgerton, the fourth book in her regency romance series that inspired the Shondaland show.
As devoted Romancing Mister Bridgerton readers remember, Colin and Penelope have a number of steamy scenes in the likes of a carriage and in front of a mirror. Coughlan and Newton have both promised that the show will remain just as sexy.
Despite Coughlan and Newton getting into character, they were caught off guard when the mystery furnishing collapsed.
“It was very Colin and Pen of us because then we just burst into laughter,” Newton quipped to BuzzFeed.
The two actors have been friends since they filmed Bridgerton season 1, which premiered in 2020. Their bond allowed them to feel safe going into the romantic scenes.
“It is a testament to the fact that we just got to a point where we were so comfortable together,” Coughlan told Teen Vogue in an interview published last month. “We’d just finished the big sex scene, the most intense and involved one … and we just felt relieved.”
According to Coughlan, the pair even lounged naked between takes.
Coughlan and Newton also worked with the show’s intimacy coordinator, Lizzy Talbot, who “was there” for every step of the process.
“She treats it like a stunt,” Coughlan previously said on the U.K.’s This Morning in March. “[Luke and I] had a lot of say in what we wanted to do as well, which was great. [Lizzy was] more like, ‘What are you comfortable with?’ But Luke and I actually … had ideas about how we wanted things to play out, which was great because we really felt like we were in control.”
The first half of Bridgerton season 3 premieres on Netflix on Thursday, May 16. The remaining episodes drop on Thursday, June 13.
