Netflix has unveiled the trailer for Season 2 of “Bridgerton,” which became a phenomenon after its Christmas 2020 premiere. The trailer teases the much-anticipated romance between Anthony Bridgerton (Jonathan Bailey) and newcomer Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley), which will be the centerpiece of the season — while also leaning hard into the show’s Lady Whistledown aspect, the anonymous gossip chronicler who in the finale was revealed to be Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan).
The second season of “Bridgerton” will premiere on March 25.
“Dearest gentle reader,” narrates Julie Andrews, who voices Lady Whistledown, as various members of the court are delivered her dispatches. “Did you miss me?” She then goes on to say that as the search to uncover who she is has escalated, she’s been “honing my skills — no, even better: I’ve been sharpening my knives.”
As a medley of images from Season 2 play out — putting Kate and Anthony’s courtship front and center — the teaser ends on Penelope putting pen to paper, as she and Lady Whistledown say together: “For all of you.”
As broken-hearted “Bridgerton” fans know, Netflix announced last year that Season 1 breakout star Regé-Jean Page, who played Simon Basset, the Duke of Hastings, was leaving the show. In Julia Quinn’s “Bridgerton” romance series — the source material for the show, which is created by Chris Van Dusen and executive producers Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers — each book focuses on a different couple. In a Variety cover story in November, Rhimes said she wanted Simon and Daphne Bridgerton (Phoebe Dynevor) to “have their happily ever after.”
After the outcry over Page’s departure, though, she did ask him whether he’d want to come back as a guest, as Dynevor will in Season 2: “Rightfully, he said, ‘I signed up to do this one lovely story, this closed-ended storyline. I’m good!’
“He’s an enormous star now,” Rhimes added. “As I like to say, the idea that we would write Regé to stand around in the background doesn’t make any sense at all to me. ‘What would he do?’ is what I like to say.”
Rhimes told Variety that she expects “Bridgerton” to go on for years. “There are eight Bridgerton siblings, and as far as I’m concerned, there are eight ‘Bridgerton’ seasons,” she said. “And maybe more.”
And that’s surely welcome news to the streamer. Netflix’s head of global TV Bela Bajaria told Variety that the company’s deal with Shondaland is successful based on what it calls the “‘Bridgerton’-verse” alone. For a time, “Bridgerton” was Netflix’s most-watched show. “It pierced culture globally — there was just so much conversation around it,” Bajaria said.
