Bridgerton carriage scene spoilers ahead, be warned gentle reader!
There comes a moment in Bridgerton season three where our resident leading man proclaims his love in utterly swoonworthy fashion. Viewers know how this works. In season one, Regé-Jean Page’s Simon tells Phoebe Dynevor’s Daphne that he “burns” for her. The second season has Anthony Bridgerton(Jonathan Bailey) confess to Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley) that she is both “the bane of my existence, and the object of all my desires.” A similarly charged moment arrives in the final 10 minutes of Bridgerton season three, which is debuting in two parts. The second half arrives June 13.
After two seasons of pining from Nicola Coughlan’s Penelope Featherington and two episodes’ worth of longing stares back from Luke Newton’s Colin Bridgerton, the childhood friends finally bring their romantic feelings out of the shadows during a tension-filled Bridgerton carriage scene in episode four, aptly titled “Old Friends.”
Fans of Romancing Mister Bridgerton, the Julia Quinn novel on which this season is based, are more than familiar with the steamy places this encounter leads. On TikTok, the topic “Colin Bridgerton carriage scene” already had more than 41.7 million posts before season three had even premiered. In March, after Coughlan first watched the scene, she let the world know by posting, “You’ll never guess what I’ve just seen…” alongside a tiny carriage emoji. The tease stirred up a fevered fan reaction, as did prerelease soundbites in which Newton and Coughlan were asked to provide one-word reactions to the word carriage itself. He chose “intimate,” while she went with some good old-fashioned “rocking.”
In both the book and show, Colin and Penelope’s carriage ride begins as a heated confrontation, but ends with a marriage proposal. The lovers find themselves “completely misbehaving,” in between, as Quinn writes in pages 223 to 249, FYI. On the show, after Penelope tells Colin that Lord Debling (Sam Phillips) did not propose to her at that evening’s ball, he kneels before her with a look of desperation. Then comes Colin’s season-defining declaration: “These past few weeks have been full of confounding feelings, feelings like a total inability to stop thinking about you, about that kiss. Feelings like dreaming of you when I’m asleep, and in fact preferring sleep because that is where I might find you. A feeling that is like torture. But one which I cannot, will not, do not want to give up.” A shocked Penelope then makes a heated confession of her own: “I’d very much like to be more than friends. So much more.” They passionately kiss, which leads to a rush of other amorous activities, perhaps best described in the book this way: “Something clenched inside Penelope, deep inside of her, in places that were never talked about.”
Coughlan tells Vanity Fair that she first became aware of this pivotal scene nearly five years ago, when she first read Quinn’s novel. “It stuck out to me because I’d never read a romance novel,” she says. “I was like, Oh, this is really steamy. Like, whoa. I laughed thinking about, Imagine me filming this one day. LOL, could never be me.” But once showrunner Jess Brownell confirmed in a Zoom with Coughlan and Newton that the scene would be included on the series, the actors began preparing for the shoot.