It’s impossible not to make Cinderella comparisons when it comes to the fourth season of Bridgerton and its main love interests, Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) and Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha). She is a lowly maid with an evil stepmother, and he is the rich son who doesn’t want to settle down – that is, until their worlds collide, and a search for true love unfolds as they both realize what might be possible in this world.
That’s the rough premise of the first half of the season, which dropped on Netflix in January. As viewers gear up for the remaining episodes to be released on Feb. 26, however, it’s worth considering that this season isn’t necessarily about fairy tale, but recognition.
Yerin Ha and Luke Thompson at a Bridgerton Season 4 premiere party in Paris in January.Aurore Marechal/Getty Images
Not only has the season been a turning point for Benedict, the town rake by all standards up until now, but it has brought viewers into the underworld of the Ton and shown what it’s like for these characters to live on the other side.
“I mean, everybody says it’s like a Cinderella trope,” Ha says. “But I genuinely believe that outside of the masquerade ball, our story is quite different. It’s not rescue, it’s recognition.”
“Falling in love is basically recognition, isn’t it?” Thompson adds.
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For Sophie, recognition has never been guaranteed. After her father died, she grew up believing she had no rightful place in the world she once belonged to.
“She’s someone who, after her father’s death, was put in a position where she was made to be invisible,” Ha says. “Her whole life is made to feel like she’s hidden.”
That invisibility shapes how Sophie moves through every room, constantly aware of who she is allowed to be and who she must pretend to be. “That’s who she genuinely believes she is, someone who is not deserving of love,” Ha says. “But through meeting Benedict, he is essentially guiding her to say that this is the person that you are allowed to be.”
Benedict, meanwhile, has spent three seasons avoiding that same kind of emotional clarity, even as fans embraced his easy charm. Thompson describes the outward confidence as only part of the truth.
“His outer layers are charming and fun and easygoing,” Thompson says. “But actually, I think that’s a smoke screen.”
Underneath the surface is someone far less certain of himself. “When it comes to a lot of deeper stuff, he is much more anxious and worried and scared, and so he defers the idea of committing to anything serious,” Thompson says. “It’s one of those blocks that you can sometimes get into in life where you’re at a bit of a hamster wheel, and you’re going around in circles.”
That tension is central to the season, when Benedict is forced to confront the difference between physical intimacy and emotional connection. “Giving someone everything is a scary prospect,” Thompson says. “It’s more than just the chase of Sophie. I don’t think as soon as he’s chased someone, he’s uninterested. He doesn’t want to go somewhere serious.”
Those character layers couldn’t be more apparent than during the early-season masquerade ball, which allowed Benedict and Sophie to connect behind actual masks. Those costumes eliminated constraints that normally define them, revealed how much of their lives have been shaped by concealment and allowed them to see each other for who they are deep down.
During Bridgerton’s early-season masquerade ball, Benedict (Luke Thompson) isn’t initially aware that Sophie (Yerin Ha) and the girl in the mask are the same person.Netflix
“There’s an awful lot of freedom to be found when you are wearing a mask,” Thompson says. “Both of those characters are protecting themselves and playing with each other a little bit, putting different masks on, metaphorically.”
As viewers saw over the first batch of episodes, Benedict and Sophie’s dynamics extended beyond the ballroom, even if Benedict isn’t yet aware that Sophie and the girl in the mask are the same person. Much of the season so far has explored how the pair edit themselves depending on who is watching. Sophie, in particular, has spent years suppressing her identity in order to survive.
“It’s a fight between identities,” Ha says. “She grew up with the experience of what it might be to be like a noble child, but she’s never had full exposure.”
The class divide that separates the star-crossed lovers reinforces that emotional distance, even as the series filters those realities through its signature fantasy lens. “It’s historical up to a point,” Thompson says. “It’s interested in those things, but only so much as they speak to a modern sensibility.”
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That balance has always defined Bridgerton, which uses the past to explore universal anxieties about belonging and identity. For Ha, the stakes of Sophie’s story never felt confined to its Regency setting. “I was more focused on what it means to not be seen or to not feel recognized, and how do you overcome that?” she says. “How do you fight for it, despite everyone else around you saying that you shouldn’t be together?”
Even as the series continues to unfold on elaborate sets, such as the masquerade ball, Thompson says the emotional core remains grounded in those quieter moments of connection. “We really did try to see what was going to happen in the take, in real time,” he says of working with Ha. “There’s a bit of magic in that, a bit of call and response.”
That intimacy has helped sustain Bridgerton’s appeal as the series enters its fourth season, giving viewers escapism that still reflects something honest about the modern world.
“Bridgerton offers that in a sincere way,” Thompson says. “People just want a bit of magic and fairy tale and dreams in their lives. I hope people see themselves or elements of themselves in the story and are able to be swept away a bit. We all need that. It’s a complicated world out there.”