Riding on the high of Polin from Bridgerton Season 3, the Netflix series has finally announced Benedict’s (Luke Thompson) love interest in Season 4: please rise for Sophie Baek (played by Yerin Ha).
When asked, the 28-year-old Australian-born actress can recall exactly where she was when she got the offer. “I was having breakfast with my mom at a cafe in Korea and I stepped outside,” Ha said in an interview released by the production company, Shondaland, on Monday. “She kind of knew immediately when I was jumping on the streets of Gangnam [a district in Seoul, South Korea]—that I got the role…[my mom] came out crying, and then after the phone call, she was like, ‘We gotta go home. I think I have indigestion.’”
The love story, which is officially in production mainly in England, will be based on the events of Julia Quinn’s third novel in the Bridgerton series, An Offer From a Gentleman. Baek is a low-born maid known as “the Lady in Silver” who, as a victim of tragic events, has been forced to spend much of her life working for a demanding employer in the ton. After disguising herself to attend a Bridgerton masquerade ball, she will meet Benedict and we’re guessing sparks will fly.
Of course, the enigmatic Sophie isn’t the only debutante to have paraded in front of Benedict, who up to this point in the Netflix series, has been the perpetual bachelor. At the end of Season 3, Benedict has a threesome with his new flame Lady Tilley Arnold (Hannah New) and her friend Paul (Lucas Aurelio), eventually ending the relationship when Arnold wants to get serious. “Benedict has always been a little lost—or free depending on the way you want to look at it. But now he’s trying to find something a bit more solid in himself,” Thompson told Netflix’s Tudum, which unveiled the news of Season 4’s lead in August.
Ha—who is best known to American audiences for her role in the Paramount+ series adaptation of the Halo video games and slated to appear in the prequel series Dune: Prophesy slated to air in November—said the role is different from anything she’s taken on before. “I never saw myself wearing clothes, even maid’s clothes, from that Regency era,” she says. “Trying those on has felt so new and fresh…I feel honored to be able to wear those gowns that everyone loves seeing.”
As for what to expect for Season 4, Ha divulges: “You can expect this emotional tug-of-war between what your heart desires and what society desires of you.” Something, no doubt, every Bridgerton fan can relate to.
