Bridgerton fans didn’t get to see most of Anthony and Kate’s road to happily ever after — and season 3 was much of the same for the fan-favorite couple.
During the first half of the third season, which started streaming on Thursday, May 17, Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) and Kate (Simone Ashley) were reintroduced to the audience as they enjoyed their marital bliss. Kate was adjusting to her new role as viscountess while Anthony jumped back into being the man of the Bridgerton household after some time away on their honeymoon.
It didn’t take long for Kate and Anthony to reconsider their immediate plans. The first episode — out of the four released by Netflix so far — featured a conversation between Kate and Anthony about not rushing into the next chapter of their lives.
“Your mother enjoys being viscountess so much, while I have already spent years taking care of Edwina and running the Sharma household,” Kate told Anthony. “And I’ve never seen you happier than when you were away from the duty of running this place. So why not put ourselves first for once and extend the honeymoon?”
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Kate noted that they had plenty of time to return to their duties later, adding, “We have our lives to be viscount and viscountess. For now, the only duty that interests me is making an heir or two.”
After their conversation, Anthony and Kate were nowhere to be found for the next three episodes. They returned in the second half with news of Kate’s pregnancy but soon the couple was off once again for India, which meant they weren’t seen again in the epilogue.
The decision caught some fans off guard as they were hoping for more romantic scenes between Anthony and Kate after their own season didn’t offer them much.
Season 2, which was released in 2022, centered around Anthony’s search for a wife. His love life got a bit more complicated than he expected, however, when he fell in love with Kate while courting her sister, Edwina (Charithra Chandran).
It took until the last few minutes of the finale for Anthony and Kate to become a couple. After relentlessly denying their feelings for each other, Anthony declared his love for Kate at the last ball of the season and she revealed that his love was reciprocated. The final scene of the season showed Anthony and Kate in bed — after they already tied the knot — before they happily went downstairs to spend time with his family.
Ahead of the show’s sophomore season, then-showrunner Chris Van Dusen hinted that Bridgerton would be taking a different approach when it came to those memorable sex scenes.
“It was never about quantity for us,” the creator told reporters in March 2022. “Our approach to intimacy on the show really is the same as season 1. And we use these intimate scenes to tell a story and to push the story forward. We’ve never done a sex scene for the sake of doing a sex scene, and I don’t think we ever will.”
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Dusen added: “It all serves a larger purpose and it’s a different story this season. It’s different characters. We’re with Anthony and Kate most of the [second] season and that’s very different from Daphne and Simon. And that’s really part of the draw to me of a project like this, the ability to tell these close-ended love stories of different characters season after season.”
Ashley, 29, meanwhile, argued that the emotional intimacy between Kate and Anthony was much more important, saying, “It makes sense for these characters because they’re so protective over their families and they’re so truthful to their duties and responsibilities — so for them to break that wouldn’t have made sense for the characters. And as Chris has said, they aren’t performative sex scenes or intimate scenes. They have a meaning behind them and I think it’s very earned when the fireworks happen.”
One month later, Bailey, 36, entered the chat to defend Bridgerton’s decision to scale back on the sex scenes.
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“What you lose in sex scenes you gain in a deeper human understanding, which hopefully enriches the world so that the future intimacy scenes won’t be the heavy feature, and [you] won’t have to lean on them as much. It’s right to surprise an audience and keep them on their toes a bit,” he told USA Today in March 2022. “It would have been wrong for Kate and Anthony to have got physical any sooner than they did. And I think the payoff is really earned.”
Viewers did get one more NSFW scene between Anthony and Kate during season 3 before they disappeared off screen. The duo is expected to make more appearances in the second half of the season following Colin Bridgerton’s (Luke Newton) unexpected proposal to Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan).
Bridgerton is currently streaming on Netflix.
