He’s a great giggler... and I like a man who makes me laugh
So are they, or aren’t they? As Netflix’s Regency romp Bridgerton gets a second series and rumours swirl of a real-life romance between stars Regé-Jean Page and Phoebe Dynevor, we catch up with them...
The scene would have made Lady Whistledown’s eyes stand out on stalks. A sleepyeyed and tousled Phoebe Dynevor and Regé-Jean Page, the hotter-than-hot stars of sexy historical Netflix sensation Bridgerton, locked in intimate conversation over breakfast in a discreet London hotel.
Disappointingly for the show’s high society gossip-monger, the scenario was far more respectable than it looked. The young actors, both of whom were living in LA 18 months ago when the show was filmed, had been flown to Britain and put up, separately, at the same hotel while they began rehearsals. Being dedicated sorts, they had decided to get a headstart on the day’s work by practising their lines in the dining room over coffee and scrambled eggs.
‘We’d see each other for breakfast and go over scenes,’ says Phoebe today, speaking from her parents’ home in the English countryside when I catch up with them both over Zoom. ‘Then we’d go and do dance rehearsals. So basically we were constantly working. We had a lot of time together and through that we formed a really close-knit bond. What could have been a very daunting, scary job ended up being lovely and supportive and fun instead.’
The chemistry born of that bond is there on screen for all to see. In the TV adaptation of Julia Quinn’s bestselling novel The Duke And I – the first in her sprawling eight-part series about the aristocratic Bridgerton family – the romance between innocent but headstrong young debutante Daphne Bridgerton and handsome Regency rake Simon Bassett, Duke of Hastings, has become one of the most talked-about screen love affairs of the century.
To say that their steamy scenes have set pulses racing is an understatement. Intimacy co-ordinator Lizzy Talbot, who choreographed them, has commented, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever spent as many days on set as I did on Bridgerton,’ while Phoebe herself has said, ‘I feel really proud of those scenes, honestly. We worked really hard at making them seem real.’
Inevitably, rumours have swirled about just how close the two actors, both single, are in real life. But both deny talk of a romance... sort of. ‘Romance? I find absolutely everything romantic,’ says Regé (pronounced ‘reggae’) rather cryptically from the LA apartment where he spends about half of his year. ‘I think that most of life is a love story – it’s really just a matter of perspective.’
For her part, Phoebe simply smiles enigmatically at the suggestion. ‘With anything like that you definitely form a bond with that person, and we’re always checking in with each other,’ she says. ‘We’re very close mates, for sure. He’s a great giggler and I’m drawn to people who make me laugh. There was a lot of gig- gling on the Bridgerton set.’
Many of the duke’s scenes have him stripped to the waist and sweating in a boxing ring with his sparring partner and friend Will Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe), and he acknowledges that female viewers might have enjoyed watching them rather more than he enjoyed training for them. ‘They had me go the full Rocky,’ he laughs. ‘I was up at 5am every day, running to the gym to have a horrible man yell at me. But the good thing was that meant the worst of the day had happened, so everything was on the up from there.’
While Regé, 31, was perfecting his
uppercuts, Phoebe was studying what it was like to be a young woman in Regency England, and not at all liking what she was discovering. ‘I would have hated living in 1813,’ she declares. ‘I was astonished to learn how little those women knew about sex – they were told nothing and they knew nothing. These days, even if no one tells us, we can Google it.’
Nor would she have taken much to the Regency style of dating. ‘Although in some ways it had a lot in common with Tinder. It was sort of like swiping left and right – “Next!” In those days you would know when a man liked you because he’d come to your house with a big bouquet of flowers, so that would have been nice. But it was a much more complicated time – a very different world… from now.’
And don’t get her started on the idea that a well-bred young woman like Daphne should be told by her family whom she may or may not marry. ‘I wouldn’t have any of that!’ she says. ‘Absolutely not. What I love about Bridgerton though is that the women in it do have their own agency within the context of the time. In fact, Daphne is actually quite a feminist character because she’s in control of her destiny. But the problem for the young women who did live at that time was that if they didn’t marry there was no other route for them.’
On screen, Daphne and the duke have been compared to Pride And Prejudice’s outspoken Elizabeth and haughty Mr Darcy. But Phoebe, who describes herself as a ‘huge Jane Austen lover’, says the sexy, stylised world of Bridgerton, in which young girls – including Daphne’s younger sister Eloise, played by Claudia Jessie and Penelope, played by Nicola Coughlan – smoke crafty cigarettes and Regency musicians play Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish covers in the background, is one Elizabeth Bennet would find hard to recognise.
‘Obviously it’s a reimagined version of the world,’ she says. ‘But that’s what I loved about it. It was taking all the elements I already knew from reading Jane Austen and then turning them on their head and adding modern music.’
Phoebe grew up with acting in her blood. The daughter of writer and actor Tim Dynevor and his wife Sally, Coronation Street’s Sally Metcalfe, she spent her childhood surrounded by theatrical types.
At 25 she’s already something of a veteran. Her first role, at 14, was as rich girl Siobhan Mailey in BBC school drama Waterloo Road, before appearing in shows such as The Musketeers, Prisoners’ Wives and Dickensian. She moved to America in 2016 to play
Clare, the Irish wife of heartthrob tattooist Josh, played by US actor Nico Tortorella, in comedydrama Younger.
Yet despite her family connections, she says it hasn’t been an easy road. ‘There’s a lot of rejection, but I knew that. My parents have been super-supportive, they told me from the start, “Just keep going.” And as I went on I ended up falling in love with the craft of it. ’
Regé’s route into the profession was more circuitous. Born in
London to a Zimbabwean nurse mother and an English preacher father, he was sent to acting lessons to harness his boundless energy. ‘I was, let’s say, a loud and expressive child, so from a young age I got kicked out of the house on Saturday mornings to go to drama school. It became a hobby and I apparently did well enough to somehow end up on their books. So I almost fell into it by mistake.
‘Then later down the line I discovered the National Youth Theatre, and it went from a hobby to something I thought I could make a living from.’
He admits that when he first put the plan to his parents they weren’t keen. ‘I come from a background where you go out and make a living so you can look after your family. So I had to reassure them that this idea of doing something that’s ostensibly quite frivolous could actually be something I could pull off, which was all they worried about.’
Putting food on the table is something neither he nor Phoebe will have to worry about for the time being. While they’ve both been working steadily for many years (Regé moved to LA part-time in 2015, where he played Chicken George in the 2016 mini-series Roots and was a regular cast member on American legal drama For The People), Bridgerton has catapulted them both onto the A-list.
Within a month of its Christmas Day release it was projected to have been watched by 63 million households worldwide, making it the fifth mostwatched original Netflix series. Last week it was announced that series two would start filming this spring, and there’s talk it could even be expanded to eight series, one for each book.
‘It’s a little bit weird with the pandemic, because I don’t go anywhere right now,’ says Phoebe. ‘We’re out in
WE’VE AN INTIMATE RELATIONSHIP AND IT’S DEVELOPING EVERY DAY
the country, and I’ve been on a couple of walks to see if anyone might recognise me but it hasn’t happened yet. So I’m very much living in a little bubble here at home.’
Regé admits he’s far from prepared to face his newfound celebrity. ‘The short answer is, absolutely not!’ he says. ‘I don’t know that anyone’s ever ready for the kind of attention that we’re at. You obviously want people to enjoy your work, but 63 million households is absolutely mind-blowing.’ He and Phoebe keep in regular touch. ‘We both had an inkling that people would enjoy it,’ says Phoebe. ‘But I don’t think we knew to what extent. So we’re definitely checking in with each other about the weirdness of that.’ Regé adds that right now he’s finding the isolation of lockdown a bit of a relief. ‘I tend to be relatively quiet anyway, I’m a bit of a homebody, I very much enjoy my work, but beyond that I’m pretty low-key.’
As for any tittle-tattle… he won’t be giving it the time of day. ‘I do my absolute best not to think about gossip. I don’t find it helpful.
‘I’m just glad people are happy with what we’ve put out, and the attention that comes with it is by the by.’