Bridgerton Season 3 may have us swooning over Penelope and Colin’s blossoming romance, but the popular Netflix series wouldn’t have taken off without what started it all: the love story between Phoebe Dynevor’s Daphne Bridgerton and Regé-Jean Page’s Duke of Hastings, Simon Bassett. Although the couple started the bingeable obsession, Page in particular has been nowhere to be found since the end of Season 1. Why is that?
Have you been curious about the lack of Simon Bassett since he told Daphne “I burn for you” in the first season of Bridgerton? Well, we have the short and long answer as to why Regé-Jean Page left his most popular role so soon after starring in the 2020 debut season.
The short of it is that Regé-Jean Page only signed on to star in Season 1 of Bridgerton, and was never planning on resuming the role further, even though the Netflix series became one of the most popular shows for the streaming service of all time. Page has since grown his career by starring in high-profile projects like The Gray Man and Dungeons & Dragons. Meanwhile, Bridgerton, which is based on Julia Quinn’s novels, follows a format where the focus turns to a new member of the Bridgerton family in each installment.
However, there’s a lot more to undress about why Regé-Jean Page and Bridgerton cut ties. Let’s gossip about it… because Lady Whistledown would certainly approve of that.
After starring as the Duke of Hastings in Season 1, Page reported was offered a chance to resume his role, but he turned it down, for an intentional loss of $50,000 per episode for the actor. When asked why more Bridgerton wasn’t in the cards for Page, here’s what he told Vanity Fair in 2023:
I signed up to do a job and I did the job and then I did some other jobs. That’s it. That’s the story. I wish it was more glamorous than that. [After] we finished the story, the temptation would be to roll with the distractions and go, ‘Oh, well, the story went really well so we can kind of change this up and make some other stuff up, I guess.’ That was never what we’d signed up to do.
As he explained, he decided to stick to his guns and not return, despite temptations, perhaps in order to best serve the story and his character. While the actor’s role on the series gave him a lot of name recognition, his comments make it sound like he looks at his career from a wider perspective in terms of wanting to have a ton of different experiences. While we may look at the Duke as someone we want to see for years to come, it seems as though Page felt he gave what he needed to the role in Season 1 alone.
Following the first season, Page may have decided upon a clean cut exit from the series, but the same cannot be said for some of his co-stars. Phoebe Dynevor went on to be part of over half of Season 2’s episodes as Daphne after starring in the hit first season. Like her co-star, she has since moved on from the series, as Daphne and the Duke had their happily ever after and moved away from society. Truthfully, while it would be nice to see them return to each season, the novels don’t make much use of the couple in the author’s subsequent stories.
In the first part of Season 3, Kate and Anthony have been part of the storyline a tad, but after their love story took place in Season 2, they are moving further into the background behind the main plotline. While Page was one of the biggest stars of the series, the actor is perhaps right in the Duke not being needed going forward in new Bridgerton seasons.
Will Regé-Jean Page Ever Return To Bridgerton?
While we wouldn’t necessarily count Regé-Jean Page out of some massive Bridgerton family reunion whenever the series ends, the actor has made it rather clear that he’s not planning to make future appearances in the Netflix show. In fact, back in 2022, when he was pictured alongside Jonathan Bailey in Italy, the actor posted it on his Instagram and said, “No, I’m not going back to the show btw – the papers made that one up” before saying him and his co-star had “the best, and most stylish, catch up” over coffee.