Video Credit: BridgertonNetflix on Instagram
Now that it is confirmed that Benedict will be the Bridgerton in the spotlight for season 4, attention in the fandom has shifted to speculation on when the actress playing Sophie will be announced. However, despite excitement and speculation from the majority of fans online, a small group within a subset of the fandom have advocated for a marketing strategy that has the undertones of racism.
Details of the casting for Sophie that have leaked suggests that she will most likely be of East Asian ethnicity, making her the second woman of colour lead in Bridgerton. This is something that causes concern among some fans due to the current negative perceptions around how the production promotes a couple with a woman of colour. Whilst the production can use the season 4 promotion to attempt to turn around this negative perception, there is a small group of fans online suggesting that it would be a good idea to not announce the actress, and hide her for a reveal when the season releases.
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I first saw the suggestion to 'hide' who was playing Sophie in a post on Reddit just under three weeks ago. The OP of the post suggested that the identity of the actress playing Sophie was hidden so the viewers find out who she is at the same time as Benedict. This suggestion was made saying it was good marketing, and whilst for some it seems like a good strategy, for a show like Bridgerton it will backfire on the production. As mentioned in the paragraph above, Bridgerton already faces a negative perception in the disparity between the way the woman of colour lead in season 2 was promoted vs the white season 3 lead. To suggest that the show hides the casting of a woman of colour lead in the season following a huge promotional push for a white lead, shows an underlying unconscious disregard for the optics of seemingly reducing a woman of colour to a marketing gimmick as opposed to being the lead in one of Netflix's biggest shows.
I am not suggesting the OP is prejudiced, but their suggestion for this marketing strategy shows a fundamental lack of care for the potential racist undertones of such a move. The way that Bridgerton promotes the female leads in the show, and specifically the disparity in the promotion given to the season 1 and season 3 female leads had in comparison to the season 2 female lead, is a discussion that has been ongoing in some areas of the fandom for some years. In this context, and environment, the suggestion that another woman of colour lead not get the same promotion as the white female leads, especially the white female lead for the season immediately preceding, is problematic at best, and exposes unconscious (or conscious) casual racism within the Bridgerton Fandom. Interestingly the comments on this Reddit post disagreeing with the OP do so because the casting is likely to leak due to social media, only one comment brought up the optics of hiding the identity of a lead that is a woman of colour. But even with one user pointing out the negative optics of keeping a woman of colour lead hidden the OP was lacklustre in their response with an idea of how they could still prevent the actress being named.
This issue could have remained on one obscure Reddit post soon forgotten, however, some users on X have picked up the idea of hiding the actress who will be playing Sophie, and not announcing her, all on the pretext of it being 'good marketing'. However, more insidiously, some of these users on X have gone on to suggest that Nicola Coughlan should be used as one of the main actors to promote S4. This (more so than the Reddit post) gives a racist subtext to their posts around this, with the suggestions that a white woman is in a better position to promote a season of Bridgerton that has a woman of colour lead. It is not surprising that many of these same users defended the heavy reliance on Nicola for season 2 promotion ahead of the leads (a woman of colour and gay man), and also defended why the season 2 woman of colour lead should have to be promoted in tandem with another woman (this will be the subject of a later post so I won't go into it much at present). Some of the suggestions made on X range from not announcing who will be Sophie until the 2025 Tudum, to not announcing her at all and have her unveiled when the season releases.
Whilst some of these fans probably think they are just coming up with extra clever marketing ideas when they suggest hiding the actress playing Sophie and using Nicola Coughlan instead, what they are actually doing is exposing some of the underlying racism in the Bridgerton fandom. Whilst I am not suggesting that all of the comments from these fans are driven by underlying racism, there is certainly distasteful racist undertones in the suggestions that a woman of colour should be 'hidden' while a white woman takes centre stage in her place.
