With Season 4 still months away, Bridgerton fans won’t be able to catch up with Colin Bridgerton any time soon. In the meantime, however, they can watch Luke Newton step into another role.
After proving his mettle as a leading man in last year’s Bridgerton Season 3, Newton will helm a new off-Broadway play, which charts the life of fashion titan Lee Alexander McQueen. That’s right: Newton will be trading in his Regency garb for designer McQueen threads. On August 19, he starts performances for House of McQueen in New York City.
On paper, the eccentric artist definitely seems like a major departure from the charming and sensitive Bridgerton brother. The 32-year-old actor compared his upcoming role to the one catapulted him into the spotlight. “I feel like probably for the first time in a long time, there aren’t many similarities, and that’s probably the thing that I’m enjoying the most,” Newton told What’s on Stage days before his off-Broadway debut.
“I’m looking back now, and I think we’re coming up to like six years of Bridgerton, so to dive into something that feels completely different from that and collaborate on it with this amazing cast, it feels like we’re all kind of in this world,” he continued. Tony nominee Emily Skinner will star alongside Newton as Lee’s mother, Joyce McQueen.
The scope of the play is also much bigger compared to Bridgerton because it spans McQueen’s entire life. “You know, this piece is particularly tricky for my character because we jump back and forth in time, through different moments in his life,” Newton explained. “So the emotional stakes shift within a second.”
In addition to taking on a new character, Newton is also changing mediums. “It’s funny how I always think about the differences between working in film or in Bridgerton, and in theater,” he said, adding that he recently discussed the topic with Skinner. “Tech week is just something that we would never have on screen. So, the stops and the starts of it, and the whole process of that, I found it so valuable, because I’m figuring out all those transitions.”
However, Newton is not a theater newbie. Before he was wooing Nicola Coughlan‘s Penelope Featherington in the Netflix period drama, he graced the West End stage in 2013 in The Book of Mormon. As an understudy for Elder Price, Newton was part of the original cast.
“I had a very clear vision that once I wrapped Season 4 of Bridgerton, I wanted to go back to theatre,” he said. “It feels like a real safe space for me, but also, it really challenges me and kind of gets me out of that routine.”
