We love a glow up, don’t we? A cursory search for ‘Colin Bridgerton’ on Tiktok, for example, reveals the depth of the public’s obsession with the transformation of the Netflix series’ actor Luke Newton. He has gone from nice-looking boy (season one) to gap-yah-tanned chap-of-the-world (season two) to, now, and – sitting in front of me in a faded Mickey Mouse t-shirt that doesn’t quite hide his gym-honed bulk – ripped and smouldering leading man (season three, coming later this year, we think).
I mean probably smouldering on screen as season three is being kept carefully under wraps. Here, in this little dressing room at the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park, with his Dickies baseball cap wedged over his morning hair, the 30-year-old Newton looks as guileless and fresh-faced as he did when he played Elder Price in The Book of Mormon straight out of drama school, which is to say, very. Possibly due to the facials he’s been having on the recommendation of his Bridgerton co-star, Nicola Coughlan (whose skin, he agrees, is “like she’s a teenager”).
