SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for Bridgerton Season 4 Part 1 (the first four episodes).
Though even Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) turns her laser-like focus to Benedict’s (Luke Thompson) love story in Season 4 of Bridgerton, a heated moment between Her Majesty and her closest friend and confidant Lady Danbury (Adjoah Andoh) brings all of their history, as explored in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, back for both women.
The tension hits its peak when Charlotte repeatedly denies Lady Danbury’s request to take a break from society and travel to her birthplace, a desire she discloses to Her Majesty in the first episode.
“It’s a costly season for these two women. I think about when Agatha says, at that first ball, to the Queen, ‘It has been the honor of my life to serve you, but now I need to do this thing,’” Andoh told Deadline. “She makes herself so vulnerable, and the shock of it means that the Queen is quick in her ‘Nope, absolutely not.’ And then Agatha has to come back again. She’s gotta do it again when she comes to the Queen and then they have a row, and then, ‘You’re my subject.’” It’s a grinding out process for both of them, so that they can come to terms with what this circumstance is, and how do they hold on to their dignity and their humanity and their love and their friendship? How do they hold on to all those things in the middle? And I like the difficulty of that.”
After another attempt asking Charlotte’s permission to leave, which the queen swiftly turns down again, Danbury makes to leave the palace as merely Charlotte’s subject, huffing that she must have forgotten her place in that position while balancing her friendship with the queen.
“There are three moments, but I’ll talk about two, in this season where you see Charlotte’s humanity,” Rosheuvel said. “That is when she plays the status card, that childlike, brat-ish ‘I’m going to fight with my best friend for the best toy,’ and then realizing, within minutes, within seconds, that that was the wrong thing to do, watching her friend walk out the room having said, ‘Okay, fine, I’ll be your subject. I’m not going to be your friend anymore.’ That realization of losing someone you desperately love and you desperately need.”
This cathartic confrontation is brought about by Brimsley (Hugh Sachs) begging Lady Danbury to come apologize to the queen, whom he fears is desponding without the constant companionship of her dear friend. But it’s Charlotte who ends up apologizing to Agatha.
“The apology comes quite rightly. For me, the actress having those two moments really celebrates Charlotte’s humanity. And I think that they are turning points for Charlotte and her friendship with Danbury,” Rosheuvel said. “And I hope Adjoah doesn’t mind me speaking for her, when, Danbury turns around and holds Charlotte and says, ‘I’m here,’ it tells us so much about their history and the cost of it, and I personally think it shoots us right back to Queen Charlotte, a Bridgerton Story, when Agatha first sees Charlotte up in the balcony. It shoots us back to that moment. It was so wonderful to play and so wonderful to have [that] depth of history to hold on to.”
Both actresses told Deadline that they’d be open to making a second season of Queen Charlotte; A Bridgerton Story. Danbury, who normally hosts the first ball of every season of the marriage mart, happily ceded that responsibility to Lady Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell), who hosts her masquerade ball as the opening event. Andoh had mixed feelings about handing over this tradition associated with her character.
“I was ambivalent about it. There’s a bit of me, that’s like, ‘That’s my ball.’ Then it’s like, ‘Yes, it’s your ball, Agatha, but you’ve said you want to go, so you have to practice someone else hosting your ball, because you can’t go and host. What do you want to do?’” the actress said. “[She] want[s] to hold on to this stuff, but she also really needs to know who the little Agatha was, the Agatha that was in Sierra Leone until she was four, and then came here, and this has been her world. But what was that? She needs to know what that was to make herself whole enough to go forward. So she hands the ball over to Violet because she knows Violet is super safe hands, also her pal, and she’s not going to be let down by a Violet ball.”
When asked if this would mean Andoh potentially stepping back from the series, showrunner Jess Brownell wanted to make very clear that “she’s still absolutely a part of the story in Season 5.”
“We have no intentions of Adjoa stepping back,” Brownell clarified. “It was more about wanting to explore the dynamic between a friendship in which there’s a power imbalance, which is very on theme with this season, where we’re looking at the relationship between servants and their employers.
“The Queen and Lady Danbury are real friends, but because of the power imbalance, it was interesting to explore what happens when Lady Danbury wants to do something for herself. It was an opportunity to explore new depth for their friendship,” the Season 4 and Season 3 showrunner continued.
While they may disagree on Danbury leaving, both actresses shared that their characters would not approve of Benedict’s offer to Sophie to be his mistress. Rosheuvel’s reaction as Queen Charlotte would be “Hey mate, you did that wrong there. You chose the wrong path there, brother. That was so the wrong path. Backtrack and think again!”
“Isn’t it interesting? As a woman, when he says ‘Can you be my mistress? You think, ‘She’s a working class woman! What are you talking about?’” Andoh added. “That’s not — you will ruin her forever if she does that. She has no future. She has no prospects. She has no chance, and it’s something about the entitlement of Benedict that maybe he doesn’t quite realize what he is asking of her. So as a women, I’d be like ‘Reverse!’”
Andoh also recalled a specific scene between Bendedict and Danbury, who have shared special encounters in past seasons.
“There’s a moment where Danbury catches Benedict looking at Colin and Penelope and the new baby. He’s not gone into the room, he’s just standing there looking, and she sidles up to him and she says to him ‘You know, you are allowed this. This can be part of your world.’” Andoh recalled. “You just have to hold out for what you want and then have the courage to ask for it.”
In addition to her new lady in waiting Alice Mondrich (Emma Naomi), Queen Charlotte also now has a certain scribe to consult about gossip and shaping the debutante season. She steers Lady Whistledown aka Penelope Bridgerton (Nicola Coughlan), an identity everyone in the Ton is now aware of, to highlight eligible bachelors in her column in Season 4 versus young debutante ladies in the past.
“I think it comes from a place of boredom,” Rosheuvel said. “I think it comes from a place of, ‘Oh, let’s switch it up.’ It comes from a place of inviting Lady Whistledown, Penelope, into the game and having that relationship be one that she can manipulate and control.”
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