Meet Bridgerton’s Duke of Dreamboats, Regé-Jean Page
For British actor Regé-Jean Page, who turns hearts on Netflix’s new period drama Bridgerton as the dashing Duke Simon Basset, playing a Regency-era dreamboat required some serious preparation.
First came “Regency boot camp”—where Page and the show’s cast were given a crash course in 19th-century etiquette. “How to bow and greet different people,” Page explained to Vanity Fair on Monday. “Plus socializing—how you address the queen, your staff, your friends, and everyone around you.” There were also intensive ballroom dancing lessons that Page and Phoebe Dynevor, who plays Simon’s love interest Daphne Bridgerton, found particularly helpful. “I think we found our connection mostly on the dance floor,” the actor said.
Then there was the physical preparation required for the shirtless scenes. “They made me do this whole Rocky thing,” says Page, whose handsome aristocratic role in the Shonda Rhimes-produced series is also an amateur boxer. “I was up at 5:00 every morning at the gym. I had a terrible man screaming at me for an hour.”
But Simon isn’t a traditional duke; his grace is more of a complicated scoundrel. Viewers learn that childhood trauma drove Simon away from the idea of marriage and toward the idea of globetrotting adventure. To get in touch with that element of the character, Page immersed himself in the music and culture of the era.
“I especially liked the idea of what Simon represented in this story,” says the actor, who found inspiration in “the Byronic hero.… He’s an outsider, traveling around the East, like Byron did. And he’s bringing in slightly different fashions, different ideas about society and how society should and shouldn’t work.” Page says he talked to the costume department about Simon’s “private rebellion,” which is reflected in his clothing choices, like “the fact that Simon always wears riding boots, no matter where he is.”
As Bridgerton began filming on location, in mansions and castles scattered across England, Page found further inspiration.
