When news about each new season of Bridgerton is revealed, it basically sets fire to the lives of every fan around the world with a Netflix subscription. Though we won’t see the upcoming Bridgerton Season 4 on the 2025 TV schedule because it’s not quite ready for this year’s new Netflix releases, viewers were already treated to the fact that the new episodes will focus on Benedict. We also know that another lead of color, Australian-Korean actor Yerin Ha, will play his love interest. Recently, Bridgerton’s author explained the difference between the show’s “color conscious casting” and the idea of “race-blind casting.”
What Did Bridgerton’s Author Say About The Show And Color Conscious Casting?
One of the things that captivated audiences when Bridgerton first debuted and pretty much blew everyone’s frilly little socks off was how it presented a radically different kind of Regency-based love story. Sure, the period costumes were there, as was a lot of very proper speaking and tons of rules about correct behavior, but we also got modern music reimagined as old-timey hits, some seriously sexy scenes and an incredibly diverse cast like none other for a romance set in the early 1800s.
The woman we owe all our Bridgerton love to, author Julia Quinn, spoke to The Charlotte Observer recently about how the casting directors approach populating this version of London’s Ton, when asked to “share more about the choice and impact of race-blind casting” for the mega-hit. Quinn said:
Well first of all I wanna point out that the producers don’t actually like to call it ‘race-blind casting’ because that implies that there was no thought given at all. That it was just sort of ‘We’re gonna go out there, we’re gonna pick whoever seems best.’ They call it more color-conscious casting because there is thought that goes into it, and a true color-blind casting would end up with a Bridgerton family that maybe didn’t even look biologically related or anything like that… I was not part of that decision but I support it 100%. I think it’s amazing. I think anything that can allow more people to see themselves in a story that is big and romantic and glamorous and has a happy ending is a great thing.
The basic idea of “race-blind casting” is that, as Quinn noted, “no thought” is given to an actor’s ethnicity/race when casting. This seems like a pretty solid idea for the sake of diversity and having as much of the broad spectrum of humanity as possible represented in our stories, but a big problem is that there’s really no such thing as being race blind.
Just like with other aspects of a person’s physical appearance, we do notice whether or not someone seems to have a certain ancestry. The point is really to allow ourselves to go beyond whatever assumptions we have about people because of their ethnicity, and base our opinions of them on what they show us of their work, personal character/values, etc.
As such, it’s great to hear that those in charge of casting put real thought into where they place diverse cast members. This has allowed them to do things like bring the heritage of the Sharma family into the story in a lovely way when those characters made their debut in Season 2, and introduce us to Queen Charlotte as a woman of color who had to deal with racism when she first married King George. All in all, a lot of people adore the show for how it casts roles, and there’s no reason to mess with it.
