If you thought the carriage scene was sexy, the second part of Bridgerton season 3 is here to blow your mind.

Following the announcement of their engagement, Colin (Luke Newton) and Penelope (Nicola Coughlan) tour their future home together. In a private moment, Colin leads Penelope to a mirror to show her how beautiful she is. He compliments her, taking down her hair and undressing her in front of the mirror, while speaking of his desire to see her. He then disrobes and they make love on a nearby chaise lounge.

But the intimate moment wasn’t actually in the book, Romancing Mister Bridgerton. Instead, Colin only expresses his desire to have sex with her in front of a mirror (while they are currently being passionate in the dark). “I want to see you sitting up,” he tells Penelope. “And then I want to crawl behind you and cup you. And I want to do it in front of a mirror.” There isn’t one handy at the moment, but he vows they’ll do so “later.”

Luke Newton and Nicola Coughlan on ‘Bridgerotn’.Netflix/Youtube

Bridgerton takes this beloved piece of dialogue and spins it into an entire scene. “In the book it’s actually not a scene, it’s just a line that Colin says,” showrunner Jess Brownell clarifies. “He says he would like to do something in front of a mirror with Penelope. But fans have obviously attached to the lines so much, that we felt like we wanted to honor it in some way.”

“For us, the mirror became a motif across the season,” she continues. “It’s thematically a stand-in for the idea of there being two selves — the self you show to the world and the self you really are. This main mirror scene in episode 5 is a moment where Penelope is stepping much more into who she really is and she’s allowing herself to be seen by Colin. Of course, she’s not letting her entire self be seen. She hasn’t told him yet that she’s Whistledown. In the second part of the mirror scene in the post-coital moment, when she sees herself in the mirror again, it becomes a reminder for her to tell him her secret.”

For the actors, it was also a major moment to deliver on the romance they’d been building to for three seasons. “We wanted to keep it true and authentic to Colin and Penelope,” says Newton. “So it wasn’t just sexy for the sake of it. It was real and honest, and we’ve seen these two characters grow up within the show, so we really wanted to portray that. We talked about it a lot. We had a group chat with the intimacy coordinator. We would discuss back and forth.”

Newton adds that against the steamy carriage scene in the prior episode, the mirror scene took much more preparation. “Mentally, I thought about it more than I did the carriage scene because of the nudity that was involved. It was something that I was prepping for and I was more aware of,” he says. “It kind of frustrated me that I thought about it as much as I did in the weeks before. There’s many more important scenes to get done, but it’s just something that takes over your brain and you are super aware of it.”

Coughlan has previously expressed that she specifically requested to be “very naked” in the scene, and Brownell reiterates that everything was done fully in concert with the actors’ comfort levels. “We had a conversation with both Nicola and Luke at the top of the season, asking them both what they were comfortable with and letting them know that we would protect whatever they didn’t feel comfortable with,” she explains. “It was great that they were both so welcoming of the challenge and it allowed us to play the moment in a way that really works thematically for Penelope to allow herself to be seen literally and metaphorically in that moment.”

In fact, Newton and Coughlan committed so fully to the moment that they broke the furniture they were laying on. “Our director asked us to up the ante and make it more passionate in the moment,” he recounts. “So we were giving our best Regency romance performance at this point, and went for it, and the leg of the chaise lounge that we were on completely snapped. We fell, it was wonky, and we burst into laughter.”

“We fell more into the chair,” he continues. “You fall down and you’re like, ‘I can’t believe we’ve broken this and it’s on camera and it’s all these people watching it on the monitor.’ We probably slightly fell out of shot.”

But Newton says it also helped cut any tension on the set and make the environment very true to the friends-to-lovers arc of Colin and Penelope. “This could be such a Colin and Penn friends-to-lovers moment,” he reflects. “That they break furniture during their first proper intimate moment together. It was really funny, and it’s nice for those moments to happen on set because it keeps it light and everyone got to laugh together. We had to reset and had to put the leg on some apple boxes or something so that it was secure. When that happens, it’ a gift on set. It just gets everyone in a giddy mood.”

Luke Newton and Nicola Coughlan in ‘Bridgerton’.Laurence Cendrowicz/Netflix

That sense of play was essential to nailing the scene. Brownell wanted this sex scene to be a bit more awkward and real than some of the steamier moments on the show, opting to include more explicit conversations about consent, acknowledgement of potential pain with it being Penelope’s first time, and more.

“In a Friends-to-Lovers season, I wanted the sex scene to feel grounded in a certain reality,” she explains. “We are in TV time and things are happening much more quickly than they would happen in real life. But in terms of including that first moment of pain, in terms of talking about consent a lot in the scene and in terms of there being a lot of laughter in the scene, I hope that it is a representation of a different kind of intimacy scene on television.”

For Newton, it was a key part of the acting experience, particularly when the actual mechanics of the scene were so heavily choreographed by the intimacy coordinator. “It’s what makes their love story different,” he notes. “This season is friends to lovers, and we really wanted to highlight that, even in the moments of intimacy. It’d be really easy to play those scenes as they get swept away in the moment, and it becomes very romantic and sexy. But we felt like it was important and a beautiful thing to see their history even in those moments of real passion. What’s really cool is it’s still really sexy. It actually makes those moments even more sexy, that there are those moments of getting consent also, and breaking into laughter immediately afterwards. People really resonate with that and it feels very real.”

Bridgerton season 3 is now streaming on Netflix.