Bridgerton star Phoebe Dynevor has nothing but praise for the way the series depicted its sex scenes.
“In a lot of the Regency stuff we’ve seen in the past, we see a very composed woman,” the English actress, 25, said in a Glamour profile posted on Tuesday, January 26. “There’s not much sexuality there. It’s very much the male gaze. I wanted to make [my character] feel modern and have sexual desires, as women do, and have a lot going on that isn’t surface level.”
On the Netflix period drama, Dynevor’s character Daphne Bridgerton engages in many sex scenes with her love interest Simon Basset, played by Regé-Jean Page. However, there was one scene where the Younger alum was tasked with masturbating, a moment she calls “the hardest scene” she shot.
“That’s saying something because there were a lot of difficult scenes to shoot. You feel very vulnerable in those scenes,” she explained to the magazine. “We did the intimate scenes like stunts — we blocked them out, so you have yoga balls in between you and all sorts of things that never make you feel exposed in any way. You always feel safe. I’d rehearse with Regé so much that we both knew what we were doing. It felt very practical. But on my own, it’s a different thing. The stage directions are very specific: You have to have an orgasm. It’s a difficult thing to rehearse, which means you don’t. You just do it.”
The former Waterloo Road actress continued, “I always get back to the fact that [our intimacy coach] Lizzy [Talbot] was on set for that scene. If we didn’t have an intimacy coordinator, it would be our director, who was a male, coming up to me and telling me what to do. That would have been awkward. I felt so safe in the knowledge that Lizzy was there, so that if something went wrong or the director wanted something different, he could speak to her first. I think it would have been a very difficult experience if Lizzy hadn’t been on set protecting me and looking after me. No one wants to be told how to orgasm by a man.”
While Dynevor had a good experience filming the steamy moments, she said that it hasn’t been easy to relive it. The Snatch star revealed that she streamed the series with her grandparents.
“I find it really hard to watch myself, but I had to if they were going to watch it,” she said on The Drew Barrymore Show on January 15. “So, I had to stand there with the remote, ready at any given point to fast-forward for them not to see any of the things I didn’t want them to see.”
Despite the awkwardness, Dynevor recently told Grazia UK that she has enjoyed seeing her character’s “coming-of-age story and her sexual awakening.”
Bridgerton, based on Julia Quinn’s book series of the same name, follows Daphne Bridgerton (Dynevor) as she crafts a mutually beneficial scheme with Simon Basset (Page) after struggling to find a husband following her debut into London society. The series proved to be a smash hit for the streaming giant as it was viewed by more than 63 households after its Christmas 2020 debut.
The popular show was renewed for a second season on January 21. Production is set to begin in the spring.
