SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers for the end of Bridgerton Season 4 Part 1.

Towards the end of Part 1 of Bridgerton Season 4, Benedict (Luke Thompson) makes Sophie (Yerin Ha) an offer he thinks she can’t refuse, but she absolutely does reject him.

As in Julia Quinn’s novel, An Offer From a Gentleman, which follows Benedict’s love story with one Sophie Beckett (changed to Baek in the show as Sophie is Korean), the second Bridgerton son gets it in his head that all of his and Sophie’s class differences and competing romantic interest can be solved by him asking her to be his mistress.

Sophie, to put it bluntly, does not take it well. She doesn’t give a verbal answer, but she leaves.

“She’s super offended. That word for her, carries a deep, traumatic root, and also it ties to her existence in this world as well, and it brings a lot of shame for her and her past childhood and how difficult it has been living the life that she has,” Australian actress Yerin Ha told Deadline. “She’s not just a maid, but she’s also illegitimate. Her walls immediately come back up. I think she forgot her station and her place, and [Benedict] snaps her out of the fantasy bubble that she [was] living in.”

Benedict doesn’t know all of these things about Sophie yet, while in the book she had revealed some of the less desirable aspects of her background when they spend time together at My Cottage after he gets sick and she helps him recover. Benedict gets the idea from a friend at Cavender’s party who tells him of his mistress, Virginia.

“I do think he makes the offer in good faith. I think, like a lot of moments in this show, he doesn’t realize, or he has this huge blind spot about how that might come across,” Luke Thompson added in the joint interview. “For him, he thinks it’s like, ‘Well, this is the solution, right? We’ll still get to do this,’ but he doesn’t see that that is not giving yourself entirely to someone. He’s still trying to control it and be like, ‘Okay, well, you could be my mistress, and that will be separate from my social life, and that can be separate from another aspect.”

L-R: Luke Thompson as Benedict Bridgerton, Yerin Ha as Sophie Baek in ‘Bridgerton’ Season 4

Thompson also pointed out that the moment could be one of great growth for his character.

“It’s a polarizing moment, which I think is great, particularly coming from a character that — I get the sense anyway, from general response to the character so far — [he’]s come across as very likable and very sensitive and intuitive and, very switched on,” the actor said. “It’s both surprising, but also makes sense of that side of him, that there is one part of him that is flawed, and that’s really saying, well, essentially saying to someone, ‘I love you.’ I mean, we’re not there yet, but it’s very difficult for him to do that, and so he’s slowly tiptoeing towards the edge and hoping that he can still hold back. And Sophie, time and time again, is like, ‘No, you can’t.’ You have to be fully in this or not.”

Showrunner Jess Brownell built up to the mistress midpoint ask without confirmation that Season 4 would be split into two parts.

“Landing on the mistress ask, I think made a lot of sense, because from the moment Benedict asked that question, the fantasy is broken completely, and it was really important for us to get to live in the fantasy and live in the romance and live in the will we or won’t we in Part 1,” she told Deadline. “And then in Part 2, you go into more of ‘Okay, let’s confront the reality of this class clash and how it affects the relationship between these two characters.’”

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