A couple of weeks ago, Lady Whistledown delivered what seemed like truly terrible news to the Bridgerton fandom: Regé-Jean Page is not returning for season two.
For those of us whose love of the show is closely related to Page and his enchanting...smile, it's a huge blow. For those of us who've done a bit of reading and are familiar with the tales told in the second Bridgerton book, the news is both less of a surprise and at least a little bit less of a bummer. Spoiler alert: The days of Simon and Daphne having graphic sex during a Taylor Swift-backed montage were over anyway.
You may recall that season one ended on an incredibly happy note for Daphne Bridgerton and her reluctant husband. They overcame their very concerning conception conflict and he moved past the issues he had with his own distant, legacy-obsessed father so he could become a father himself. Daphne got the family she longed for, Simon dealt with his trauma, and their story was essentially over as far as this series is concerned.
According to an interview with Variety, that's exactly how Page and the producers at Shondaland saw the role, too. He was only ever contracted for one season.
"It's a one-season arc. It's going to have a beginning, middle, end—give us a year," he told the site of the early conversations he had about the role. "[I thought] ‘That's interesting,' because then it felt like a limited series. I get to come in, I get to contribute my bit and then the Bridgerton family rolls on."
The Bridgerton books are romance novels, after all.
"One of the things that is different about this [romance] genre is that the audience knows the arc completes," Page said. "They come in knowing that, so you can tie people in emotional knots because they have that reassurance that we're going to come out and we're going to have the marriage and the baby."
Executive producer Shonda Rhimes, who is quite well-acquainted with writing off beloved characters, was pretty surprised as the internet's uproar over Page's exit.
"I was really shocked, because usually that happens when I've killed off somebody that's been around for a while," she told Vanity Fair. "Like, we didn't kill him, he's still alive! [Regé-Jean] is a powerful, amazing actor and that meant we did our job—every season, our job is finding the right people and putting together this incredible, world-shifting romance."
Rhimes said she didn't expect such an "explosion" online, since the books only focus on one romance at a time.
"What would be the ever-after of this combo?" she wondered. "I mean, really: What would Regé-Jean do, you know what I mean? We gave them their happily ever after! And now we have this next couple coming."
And reader, let us tell you, that next couple is worth the wait.
Just as the second book does, the second season will switch focus to Daphne's older brother Anthony (Johnathan Bailey) and his search for a wife. He thinks, in fact, that he's found her in a beautiful woman named Edwina (played by Charithra Chandran), but he gets real distracted by her meddlesome older sister, Kate (played by Simone Ashley).
Many book readers might tell you that they like the second book, The Viscount Who Loved Me, even more than the first book, The Duke and I. Some might say it's their favorite of the whole series. Some book readers might even tell you that they joyfully devoured the entire book all in one night. Author Julia Quinn is particularly excited about the story we're about to see unfold.
"All I know is that, you know, having written the source material, I think we're all going to be happy because they really set it up beautifully for all of us to really want Anthony to both win in life and get his comeuppance," she told E! News. "At the same time, and I think it's gonna happen. His love interest just really is his match and it's going to be great."
Simon and Daphne do occasionally pop up in later books, but they don't really have storylines of their own. In fact, in The Viscount Who Loved Me, they only appear in one scene—a pivotal game of Pall Mall. It's an important scene, but a single scene all the same.
In the show's official announcement of Page's departure, Lady Whistledown revealed that Daphne will "remain a devoted wife and sister, helping her brother navigate the upcoming social season." That doesn't sound to us like the Duke would have had much to do, or at least not much to do in terms of romance. And if the writers of the show tried to give Simon a bigger role in the one, very important scene he's in, it might actually ruin a big, beloved part of the story.
That scene, in fact, is the one scene that Quinn said was most important to preserve on screen for the sake of the book fans.
"There's a scene in the book where they're playing Pall Mall which is like a precursor to croquet, and in the Bridgerton [family], Pall Mall is really a bloodsport," she told E! News. "They're very competitive. And I think it might be the most popular scene in any book that I've ever written—at least that I hear about from people, so that that was my thing. I was like, we have to have the Pall Mall. I'm pretty confident it will happen."
Simon is not a super important player in the important game of Pall Mall, but he does provide Kate and Edwina with one non-Bridgerton ally. And that's about it.
If you're a fan of the romance trope where two people hate each other but also want to tear each other's clothes off—and if the show does its job correctly—you're going to be so into Bridgerton season two that you're not going to be thinking about the duke from season one.
Page, meanwhile, is busy as can be. Season one of Bridgerton made him a star, and he quickly landed two high-profile projects. He's got a mysterious part in the Dungeons & Dragons movie and, most upsettingly, he's starring alongside Chris Evans, Ryan Gosling and Ana De Armas in the Netflix movie The Gray Man. That's such a good, attractive cast that we might actually not survive it!
So fear not, dear reader. Season two of Bridgerton will be filled with plenty of other good-looking people getting naked to orchestral arrangements of pop songs and Page will be back on our screens in no time. We will all be fine, at least until The Gray Man comes out and we all simply pass away.
Season one of Bridgerton is available to stream on Netflix.
A version of this article was originally published on April 2.