‘We’re Not Thirst Trap Puppets’

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Bridgerton is still one of the most popular reasons to have a Netflix subscription, and four seasons in that doesn’t appear to be stopping. Fans are hanging on every twist and turn in the characters’ relationships, especially the show’s steamier moments, which in the latest season included an iconic sequence in a bathtub.

Bridgerton season 4 stars Luke Thompson and Yerin Ha, who played leads Benedict and Sophie, recently spoke with THR about one of the sexier scenes in the series, one well known to fans of the original book. When asked about what it was like to film the scene, Thompson explained that his goal was actually not to make it sexy, but to make it feel real. He explained…

With those scenes, the thing to really hold at bay, for me anyway, is that sort of pressure of, ‘Oh, it’s this kind of scene and we need to deliver this kind of thing so that people need to be excited’ or whatever. I think that’s not really your job. Your job is to just live the scene.

Bridgerton is something of an outlier in television these days as TV and film have seen something of a decline in sex and nudity on screen in recent years. It’s frequently remarked that Gen Z is less interested in seeing these sorts of scenes. One of the reasons for thatis believed to be that they don’t see the way sex is portrayed on screen as being particularly realistic.

Thompson indicates that in his case, the goal is very much to make the scenes realistic. The actors are encouraged to simply film the scene rather than worry about how it’s going to look on screen. He credits the show’s intimacy coordinator for accomplishing this, and focusing the actors on simply making the scene, and not being “thirst trap puppets.” He continued…

Lizzy [Talbot], the intimacy coordinator, enables you to do that. She puts you straight in the scene rather than standing there thinking, Are people going to enjoy this? You can’t really control that, so you have to keep that side of things at bay because we’re not thirst trap puppets. We try and deliver something real, the story of it.

Setting aside the fact that “Thirst Trap Puppets” is an excellent band name that somebody should use, this makes a lot of sense. While sex scenes are undeniably meant, to one degree or another, to excite an audience, they’re also, one hopes, meant to progress a story, and the actors should be focused on the latter objective. The rest of it can be handled by cinematographers and editors who frame the sequence in a way that makes it fun TV.

Filming the bathtub sequence had plenty of things to navigate. Yerin Ha mentions that everything from the use of oil to, her own small stature in a large bathtub made the scene somewhat complex.

Perhaps this is exactly why a show like Bridgerton is so popular. While some may argue that Bridgerton sometimes isn’t horny enough, people don’t mind sex scenes; they just feel they shouldn’t feel quite so polished. Fans are already excited for Bridgerton Season 5. We can expect the show to continue its approach to steamy television, which will no doubt still be fun to watch, even if that’s not what the actors are ever worried about.