Actor Claudia Jessie has opened up on fan theories that her character in Bridgerton might be part of the LGBTQ+ community, and lovers of the Netflix period drama will be pleased to learn that Jessie may well be involved in a queer romance in the future.
Ever since the first season of the show arrived in 2020, many people had suspected that the fifth Bridgerton child might have been LGBTQ+, but so far, Eloise has been written as straight, as in the books the show is based on.
However, according to a new interview with Business Insider, Jessie revealed that there is “room” for her character to explore non-heterosexual relationships in future seasons of the widely beloved television show.
“I’ve always loved that there’s this coding that people have with Eloise,” Jessie noted. “There’s a strength in her that I think a queer storyline can connect. And I’ve always been touched by that as a notion with Eloise. But yeah, there’s definitely room for all of that.”
The showrunner for Bridgerton, Jess Brownell, has also recently spoken of the queer possibilities of Eloise, admitting that there will “absolutely” be more gay stories in the period drama over the next few years.
“I think this is a show about the many ways in which people love,” Brownell admitted. “So it only feels right to show all the ways in which people love, including queer love. So we are exploring queer love stories across the next couple of seasons.”
However, Brownell refused to say which of the characters in Bridgerton would be part of queer storylines. “I don’t want to say exactly how that plays out,” she said. “But it was important to me to foreground queer love and to tell queer stories and tell stories about queer joy as well.”
In other Bridgerton news, actor Nicola Coughlan has said that she found that in the third season of the show, she was “finally” allowed to “shine” in the spotlight. “I got teary-eyed,” the actor recently told The New York Times, “It felt like a Pretty Woman moment. They were finally going to let me shine.”
“For the first two seasons, the objective, in the nicest way, was not meant to make me look nice,” Coughlan added, “A lot of the Featherington aesthetic was a ‘more is more’ approach. Pen was a supporting character, the oddball in the corner, but this time she’s very much centre stage.”
