Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story has been one of Netflix’s crown jewels in 2023, quickly rising to the top spot globally and building on the success of its parent series, Bridgerton. The prequel follows a young Charlotte (played by India Amarteifio) and her marriage to King George (Corey Mylchreest), which eventually grows into a beautiful love as they face his mental health crises together. To make way for their match, the Princess Dowager (Michelle Fairley) orchestrates a Great Experiment to elevate wealthy citizens of color to the status of nobility, and the newly-christened Lady Danbury (Arsema Thomas) must fight to maintain her position in the face of personal upheaval.
The world of Bridgerton was well-established in seasons 1 and 2, but Queen Charlotte had the duty of explaining its origins. To achieve a sense of continuity, the prequel series incorporated present-day scenes with Charlotte and other familiar actors, while the creative team employed the same musical aesthetic as Bridgerton and a similarly colorful costume palette. But making the world believe in George and Charlotte’s romance while also effectively tying it to the alternate universe of the original series was a Herculean task that required all hands on deck.
Screen Rant spoke to editors Matt Pevic and Denise Chan, who edited the first and second episodes of Queen Charlotte respectively, about their experiences in Shondaland. The two make up an editing team, with Chan serving as assistant editor on Pevic’s episode before tackling her own, and they discussed their collaboration with Shonda Rhimes and admiration for India and Corey’s chemistry.
Matt Pevic & Denise Chan Talk Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
Screen Rant: What does being an editor entail for you generally speaking, and how usual is it to only work on one or two episodes out of the season?
Matt Pevic: The job of editors is to take in all of the footage that is shot throughout the project and make sense of it. We take the wide shots, medium shots, close-ups, and specialty shots, then put them all together in a style that helps enhance the writing, acting, directing, and cinematography. Our job as editors is trying to elevate everything; heighten the emotions of the story or enhance performances as best we can.
I’ve been with Shondaland for over a decade, so I was back when they were on ABC. That was a different situation than it is now, where we’re at streaming with Netflix. Almost on every project, there tends to be three sets of editing teams. Denise and I are a team, so we had the first two episodes. On longer series, you’re going to end up editing a lot more episodes, but that’s generally how it goes. Every once in a while an editor might get to do an entire series, but in general, they separate it out by team.
Denise, when going from assistant editor in episode 1 to editor in episode 2, which aspects established by Matt did you want to build on or did you need to shift tonally?
Denise Chan: First of all, I love being able to collaborate with Matt. He’s so generous with his mentorship, letting me come in and play with the episode and work with him on it. It’s fantastic. I see him as my first producer; he’s my first line of defense. I’m cutting something and watching his reaction, so he is my first customer. I always want to make sure that the audience is reacting well.
We could disagree on certain things, like maybe who the story belongs to or what perspective we focus on, but we talk about it. It’s like, “Okay, what direction are we going to take this?” Then we figure out what we can try, and I’m always very open to trying. That process of going about it is really wonderful, and it just makes the story much stronger.
The show is primarily about Charlotte and George’s romance, but it is also responsible for establishing the political reality we see in Bridgerton. How does editing come into play when balancing both those aspects of Queen Charlotte?
Matt Pevic: I would say that, in every relationship that I am looking at from an editorial perspective, we’re looking at a power dynamic. That’s the nature of a scene, especially a two-person scene, right? You’re looking at who has the push and who has the pull, and who we’re going to favor to enhance that power dynamic. Then we come to a resolution at the end of the scene, and we move on.
In balancing the political nature of this story with that love story, we found that they really intertwined beautifully. The political is told in the love story, and the love story is told in the political aspects. It’s about joining together; about people uniting — and I think that is a genuine theme that Shonda looked for as she was writing the story. How can we unite people of different cultures, aspects, and creeds? It’s Bridgerton’s first gay couple uniting together; it’s black and white.
And that’s always been a theme in Shondaland, which is one of the reasons that I’ve been here as long as I have. It’s fun to tell that story, and it’s fun to see the reaction from viewers because it really brings a lot of people together.
Were there any moments that were either the trickiest from a technical aspect, having to put them together, or from the perspective of the emotional impact you wanted to land?
Denise Chan: At the beginning of episode 2, Shonda had written about 20 pages of a montage. Looking at the story as a whole, it is really a story about what it’s like to be married, and all the traumas or problems associated with it. This is not a bed-of-roses kind of story, unlike Bridgerton. It is very grounded and heavy and talks about real adult themes. We’re always trying to track the emotional quotient of this main character.
Episode 2 is really Charlotte’s story. We have not gotten to George’s story, and we don’t know that George’s story is going to come. So, we are tracking Charlotte’s emotions and working with a montage that has no dialogue — it’s essentially like a silent film. And the kind of footage that Shonda is actually writing is forcing our audience to watch simple stuff, like changing clothes or changing hairdos. Sometimes you don’t even see the face, it’s just her shoes being put on, or her gown.
We’re telling that story of her being a doll in the dollhouse, getting dressed up and repeating that same activity that gets more and more frustrating. Her husband is away, and there’s only an empty chair as the only thing symbolizing his presence or absence. It’s a very heavy story that is only going to get heavier, but we can’t really have a whole show based on that. Nobody’s gonna really want to watch it, so that’s why Shonda has so cleverly scripted in moments of levity.
You’re setting her up in this dollhouse palace, and immediately in the opening shot, she’s in bed disoriented after what happened in the first episode. Then the door flies open, and her servants are coming in, making her put on this and that in a flurry of activity. The pacing and the tone establish the world that she is now in; that meaningless, rich world that’s going to be repeated in her life. We make it fast and exciting to watch at first, but as it goes on, it gets heavier and heavier.
But we also don’t receive all that montage in one go; we receive pieces a couple of months down the road because that’s the way the shooting schedule works. It depends on locations and actor availability, and all kinds of different things. As editors, it’s our job to wrangle all these pieces. You get to put in lovely text cards of, like, “Her hair is getting done,” and sometimes you don’t even know what they’re gonna shoot. But you just have to make it work. I ended up composing a soundscape to fit temp tracks that don’t go together. It’s about 20 minutes, and you’re tracking emotions that go up and down. Suddenly, there’s comedy, and then she’s screaming and yelling. But things have to work together.
I think the trickiest part was finding music that conveys the right emotion at the right time, with the right instruments as well. Because Shonda loves her instruments, and she’s very particular about what we can and cannot have. We recruited our music editor, Sean Spuehler, who is amazing at helping us find all this music and go through iterations of what feels good. I’ve never cut a montage that was 20 minutes, so it was a really exciting learning experience.
I know Shonda really put pen to paper for this one, but how hands-on was she in the editing process? Did you have conversations about any scenes that evolved or had to be cut in the end?
Matt Pevic: Shonda was very involved — as was Tom Verica, the director, who’s been involved with Shondaland for a really long time. It was nice because we have a shorthand, so I had a sense of what she wanted and needed out of the show going in. That was one of the reasons I really wanted to be a part of the first episode of Queen Charlotte; to help establish this world by knowing Shonda’s feelings and the traditional way that she tells a story.
One of her many talents is that she engages the audience by one character rapidly staccato attacking another with their dialogue. We’re in it, we’re listening, and it’s back-and-forth rapid staccato. Then she’ll give a long speech, and it’s just two characters connecting to one another. As an editor, you might quick cut at the very beginning, and then you pause to see them both take each other in, and you slow it all down. That’s really fun, editorially, to look at the entire show from the perspective of, “How can I enhance that from the writing?” It’s just a matter of trying to achieve what is in the writing through editorial as well.
It’s a six-episode series, and they were meant to be half-hour episodes. In the writing, they all came closer to an hour, and early on, there was a lot of discussion. “Are we going to do an eight-episode half-hour show? Are we going to do a six-episode one-hour show?” Even before the scripts had been written, (we were discussing) what kind of show this was going to be. It turned out that six hours was just right; we left people wanting more, but the scripts themselves were so tight. There wasn’t a lot cut out of these shows. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything cut until later episodes, which we didn’t work on.
In the first episode, the only thing that I can say was really cut out of the show was right after the marriage. There is a brief little montage of them dancing with one another, which is really beautiful. They shot an entire song’s worth of that scene, so it was a two-and-a-half minute scene. There were a lot of looks between the Princess Dowager, the Queen’s brother, and Lady Denbury. There were so many looks back and forth about the politics going on, but everything was left unsaid.
In the end, Shonda was right to say, “This is going to undercut the ball that the Danburys throw later in episode 3. It’s going to undercut that to watch these two fall in love over a dance. Let’s show that later.” And it was the right move. Now, we just have little snippets of it, and it’s lovely. You start to fall in love with those characters, and then of course, Shonda pulls the rug out from under you when George tells Charlotte he wants to go back to Kew.
That leads me to my final question. Fans around the world have been blown away by India and Corey’s chemistry. How inevitable did that seem to you when editing, and are there any ways you work to further emphasize the important aspects of George and Charlotte’s relationship?
Matt Pevic: I take absolutely no credit. When we first get the script, Denise and I will read it once. I might read it again, and then when we get the scene itself, I’ll read that scene again. I really want to be familiar with the script so I know exactly what the themes are within every scene. When I read the meet-cute scene where Georgia and Charlotte first speak to each other, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. How can I help?” Because it’s just so lovely. We hadn’t seen the actors yet, so we didn’t know how were they going to interact. Are they going to project the charm and charisma that is shown in this script?
But then Corey just delivers. I mean, he just knocked it out of the park. I’m watching this footage, and he mesmerized me in the dailies for take after take after take. So, then my job is just to sit back and let them do their job, and maybe to extend it as much as I possibly can, so we can watch them just fall in love. I’ll never forget getting that shot of him grabbing her hand in the garden and thinking, “We’ve got the show. This is it.”
It was a challenge for me, just because that scene came really late in the process. There was a big old placeholder for that scene for a long time, and we actually got their big fight when he says, “I do not want to go with you,” early on. That scene showed the power of their acting chops, so it made me a little less worried when that came about.
Denise Chan: I have an anecdote, actually. In the meet-cute scene, as I was watching the dailies, I was following Corey’s acting. He gives us a lot of variations, and sometimes he would pause for effect. I was thinking, “Okay, this guy is really good. He’s elongating stuff; he’s contracting stuff; he’s playing with rhythm.” And then I realized at some point that there was a part where he actually forgot his line. But he was so good at covering it up that he made forgetting something a bit that we could actually use. And how valuable is that? That is real acting chops.
Also, I got to cut the gag reel. And there, you can see that the connection between them is real. They are just high-fiving each other, and really being each other’s support. That is how close they are, and that helps the morale on the set. It just cascades into all the other characters, and you can tell that they’re so comfortable. When morale on set is great, you just see it on camera so much more.
Matt Pevic: That’s also a tribute to Tom Verica, who directed this entire series, because he did help establish that giant morale on set. I wasn’t there, but I do know that he really worked with those two off-camera, getting to know one another. He set up times for them to just chat about random things, so they knew each other and were comfortable around each other. When the harder scenes came, it was more of a breeze for them. Well, it wasn’t a breeze, but they made it look like a breeze.
About Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
Centered on Queen Charlotte’s rise to prominence and power, this Bridgerton-verse prequel tells the story of how the young Queen’s marriage to King George sparked both a great love story and a societal shift, creating the world of the Ton inherited by the characters in Bridgerton.
Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story is now streaming on Netflix.