Go Behind the Scenes of Bridgerton’s Masquerade Ball

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I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived on the Bridgerton set in mid-October 2024. Though I had been writing for Town & Country for a few years, I had never visited a film or television set for the magazine before, and I was excited that Netflix had invited me out to the UK. Arriving to Shepperton Studios in Surrey, England, I immediately understood why sneakers were recommended: The place was ginormous.

That week, Bridgerton was filming one of its key moments of the first part of season four: The masquerade ball where Sophie (Yerin Ha) and Benedict (Luke Thompson) first meet. The story, a spin on the classic Cinderella tale, is drawn from Julia Quinn’s An Offer from a Gentleman. Like the fairytale, it follows a young woman working as a maid in her abusive stepmother’s home who sneaks into a ball. Since this is Bridgerton, there’s a long way to go between that love-at-first-sight and the promised happily ever after.

Though the masquerade ball is a lavish, big scene, the actual set on soundstage 4 felt much smaller and more intimate than I expected. In addition to getting to witness the filming of the moment Benedict spots Sophie from across the room, and introduces himself, I watched a few other masquerade ball moments: Violet meeting Araminta, Benedict arriving late and being chastised by his mother, and Benedict interacting with debutantes. Throughout it all, I couldn’t stop watching all the extras, called “supporting artists” and was impressed by the level of detail in every person’s look.

When I spoke with Nic Collins, Bridgerton’s hair and makeup designer, John Glaser, the costume designer, and Alison Gartshore, the production designer, I asked how they brought the scene to life.

Planning for the masquerade ball began in pre-production—in fact, it started with crafting mood boards on their first day for season four. The costume team created 172 looks for the masquerade ball, among them king and queen chess pieces, a sheep, a rabbit, a horse, and the sun. “In previous seasons, balls have a theme and we vaguely follow that theme,” Glaser says. “Because we’re used to giving them a theme, I thought it should all be Violet, because it’s Violet ball, but then George [Sayer, assistant costume designer] said it would look like a cult.”

He continues, “Then we start to think about what’s available and how many people there are. We actually thought the people from the town would come to the ball, so it would be a mixed match of everything, which is what we tried to do. We didn’t want it to look like a Venetian ball. We just thought of each person that would come, what they would make up at home. It’s not a Halloween party, but at a Halloween party, everybody has made their clothes or borrowed clothes. It’s just a mismatch stuff. And we wanted it to be exotic.”

“We started making the wigs one by one, each one [we] decided the color, the style, the texture, the hair. The only thing at that point we didn’t have was who was going to be wearing it,” says Collins. There were some specific wigs they couldn’t make until they knew which supporting artist would be wearing them, Collins explains. Ultimately, they made 160 wigs in total.

Queen Charlotte’s masquerade ball wig was one of the most elaborate, featuring a unique design that paid homage to the cosmos, a nod to the Queen Charlotte prequel and symbolizing her love for George. The wig, per Netflix, “includes a heart-shaped outer cage crafted from hair and adorned with silver leaf, and inside sits a replica of the nuptial crown that George gifted her — also made from hair.”

This is her first season working on the Netflix drama, though she had worked on the prequel Queen Charlotte, and to come in and immediately start working on the masquerade ball was exciting. “You’re always wanting the opportunity to showcase [your work],” she says, “and prove yourself because you’re new. So [the masquerade] couldn’t be more perfect, from my point of view.”

For production designer Alison Gartshore, she and her team began with the concept of a “Midsummer’s Night Dream.” “We knew it was a masquerade ball, and we were very conscious that we didn’t want it to become too macabre because the masquerade has a slight macabre feel to it sometimes—that’s how often it’s portrayed, but this is the Bridgeton family. So it couldn’t be that. It had to be very beautiful.”

She continues, “We arrived at the consensus that [the ball would be] Midsummer Night’s Dream, midnight, woodland fairies. Then we start researching, we start getting images together, do mood boards, send them backwards and forwards, and you distill it down into the quintessential essence of what you want to do with the space.”

Key to getting that theme across in the space was an abundance of “drapes everywhere.” The drapes were printed with an ombre color transformation, going from dark midnight blue to twilight tones. “We had a team of people gluing individual gems on there, so they would sparkle in the light [on] hundreds of meters of the fabric.”

Complementing the dramatic curtains were white florals. The flowers, Gartshore explains, were meant to feel like “the servants had gone out into the estate and just got whatever they could find—ivy, twigs, birds’ nests, the odd horn here and there, and they really kind of woven these garlands together from their own land. All the florals had to be white because we wanted to look sort of moonlight flavor to it. It ended up looking really quite magical.”

The standout of the entire set, however, was the blue floor—which contains a hidden easter egg. “Bridgeton does push the boundaries here and there, but we do always try and do things which they could have done,” Gartshore says. “So they often used to do painted floor cloths for a space, or a theater piece. So they had paint, they had canvas, they used to cover the floors and do a paint a scene on the floors. That was quite a known thing to do. So, I drew a sky-scape that I thought would be beautiful to see them dancing on. Then it just struck me that actually we should put the constellation of love in there—so we put the Cassiopeia constellation. It’s just a nod to the storyline.”

While Benedict and Sophie’s story draws from the Cinderella fairytale, Gartshore intentionally did not look at the 1950 animated film or any subsequent adaptations. “I thought about it,” she says, “and I thought actually sometimes when you see an image, it sticks in your head and then you can’t get away from it. So it’s better not to look. I just really concentrated on the Bridgerton-ness of it. So for Lady Bridgeton, it just had to be very beautiful and very magical space.”

During the rest of my visit to the Bridgerton set, we spent time touring the brand new back lot, which spans approximately two acres and features the streets of Mayfair, homes, and shops. The amount of detail that went into each storefront—even though audiences may never see it up close. Those details, Gartshore, are “absolutely vital.” She continues, “You can get the overall space, but if the details aren’t right or if there’s not enough of them, then it looks very flat and dull and it looks like a set.” I also got to see the costume warehouses—yes, warehouses, plural—where everything is made for the cast.

Despite the awe and splendor of the costumes and the huge back lot sets, my favorite moment from the week came on soundstage 4, during the filming of the masquerade ball. Thompson and Ha were rehearsing the first moment their characters met. The set was cleared for them, so we were watching from video village just outside—a series of monitors set up for various creatives to watch what is happening just beyond the wall.

Ha, in her Lady in Silver dress, didn’t have her mask on, and wore slippers; Thompson was in his costume. As they walked through the scene, they continued to check in with each other. I came away from my week on the Bridgerton set with a greater appreciation for just how much work goes into a single minute you see on Netflix. And I can’t wait to rewatch again and again.

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