Bridgerton season 4 star reveals Lady Violet's sexy new romance as a mature woman: "We're not dead!"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

In its own impeccable way, Bridgerton has always pushed TV boundaries. The surprise for series four is that it’s Ruth Gemmell’s character, matriarch Lady Violet, doing some of the pushing.

“Mostly she does more of the same this year,” says Gemmell, “trying to force her children into marriage. She’s rather irritated with Benedict at the beginning because he’s not really playing ball. But she also spends a lot more time with Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis).”

“Spending a lot more time” is Gemmell’s euphemism for what becomes quite the steamy romance with Anderson.

“I was a little bit scared when I read the scripts, if I’m honest. Just because I’m pushing 60 and the idea of having the same kind of storyline as the children was not massively appealing. But it was a laugh. Daniel’s lovely and it was a bit of a chance to do something different.”

Violet’s relationship with Marcus is indeed something different. In fact, his character doesn’t actually feature in Julia Quinn’s novels and was invented entirely for the series. Quinn has stated she couldn’t imagine anyone good enough for Violet and never wrote about her remarrying.

“I felt quite strongly that I wasn’t massively open to the idea [of Violet finding a new partner],” Gemmell says. “Only because we have steered away from the books quite a lot and I don’t want to do the books or their fans a disservice. But then when you have a book, it changes dramatically when you put it onto screen. So you have to go with it.”

Which she gamely does. Violet and Marcus have, if not a torrid affair, then a simmering one, and it’s undoubtedly unusual for television to depict older people in such an intimate sexual relationship.

“We’re not dead!” says Gemmell. “As a society, we get wrapped up in the first throes of love and that is represented with youth and all of that. But I think there’s a lot of mileage to come from somebody with experience, whether that’s heartbreak, grief or life in general. Our viewer demographic is around my age anyway. So, it’s nice to be representative.”

This new storyline meant that, for the first time in four series, Gemmell worked with an intimacy coordinator.

“The first time I realised that there was going to be a bit of a foray into this area was at a costume fitting and that freaked me out. But they were very respectful about what I was and wasn’t prepared to do. You have a conversation with the intimacy adviser, it’s a closed set and you have a crew that you know well, so you feel safe. Also, it was very restrained compared to some of the younger lot. Which was a bloody relief for everyone, probably.”

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