With Bridgerton star Regé-Jean Page hosting it, it was inevitable to commemorate Saturday Night Live’s hugely popular Netflix series.
After Page channeled his Simon Basset character in the opening monologue while trying to convince viewers that “he’s just a normal guy” and has nothing to do with the Duke, the British-Zimbabwean actor re-enacted the Bridgerton character later on the show in a sketch.
The sketch takes on one of the most talked about parts of Bridgerton, his sex scenes. It shows Page playing herself on the set of the Netflix Regency drama. SNL’s Chloe Fineman, who appeared as Daphne Bridgerton in Dage’s monologue, plays Phoeve Dynevor, who plays Daphne on Bridgerton. The sketch begins with a heart-to-heart recreation of the famous wedding night between Simon and Daphne, in which he confesses to her that “I burn for you”. (Page also dropped the famous line in his monologue.)
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The Bridgerton director, played by Kate McKinnon, then yells “Cut” and announces that Page and Finemans Dynevor are to do a sex scene next. But Bridgerton’s regular intimacy coordinator Paula had been exposed to Covid, so Netflix brought a backup, Richie (Mikey Day) and his assistant and nephew Randy (Pete Davidson).
The duo have a background in on-set special effects including explosions, wind and “gross stuff” and were recently certified as intimacy coordinators through Zoom after work in their original area dried out due to Covid.
It turned out that the two are unfamiliar with the script.
“I didn’t read it, it seemed like a girl’s show,” says Davidson’s Randy.
Day’s Richie believes Simon and Daphne are brother and sister of protests from Page and Fineman’s Dynevor.
“It’s Netflix, they’ve got some dark stuff on it,” explains Richie.
The intimacy coordinators give Page a ziploc bag full of humble garments of questionable cleanliness and hand over Fineman’s Dynevor green-screen-friendly pies they invented.
The sex scene choreography that Richie and Randy demonstrate is even more questionable. (You can see the sketch above.)
Much has been written about the sex scenes on Bridgerton in which Lizzy Talbot is employed as the intimacy coordinator.
In an interview with . last month, Julie Anne Robinson, director of Episode 6, which contained the majority of the sex scenes from season one as well as the opening episode, described the process of creating a sex scene on the show.
“I would rehearse with the actors, we would go through the scene in detail and we would decide what story the scene told,” said Robinson. “Then Lizzy, whom I trust very much, left and it was almost like a stunt rehearsal. I would do a dance sequence in the next room, they would do an intimacy test. Lizzy would say, “Hey, we’re ready, we’ve got something to show you.” I would go in, I would see what they did, and I would go into exactly the changes I wanted, just like I would with a fight sequence and a stunt coordinator. “
Since Bridgerton’s bedroom scenes were filmed in an authentic Regency house, “there were room monitors in the room when we did the sex scenes and they wouldn’t go,” said Robinson.
She pulled the curtain on the actual filming of the sex scenes that the SNL sketch alluded to.
“People don’t really get it. You have to make sure the actors are comfortable by giving them props to place between their bodies to make them feel comfortable. So there is no physical contact, it’s all one Illusion, “she said. “We would shoot a scene, the room monitor would sit there and look, and I would have to shout ‘Hold’. Lizzy, the intimacy coordinator, ran in with anything, a piece of yoga mat or whatever, and then she ran out, I’d say ‘next’. It’s the least romantic thing you can imagine. “
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