It’s difficult to know when the squealing began. “My mom said it was just [when they showed] the back of my head when I arrived,” Luke Newton, Bridgerton season three’s resident heartthrob, tells Vanity Fair with a slight shake of his head. We’re discussing the Netflix show’s recent premiere in New York City, in which the season’s first episode played for a packed theater of press and fans—some of whom were dressed in full-blown Regency-era garb. Attendees audibly gasped throughout the episode, perhaps clutching their literal pearls as Newton’s Colin Bridgerton and his longtime confidant Penelope Featherington (played by Nicola Coughlan) finally embarked on their long-awaited love story.

“It was wild, but a really special moment,” Newton says two days later, seated in VF’s Still Watching podcast studio to record an upcoming episode. The actor then allows himself a few moments to revel in the audience response. “When the new suitor [Sam Phillips’s Lord Debling] arrives, I was like, ‘Okay, here we go.’ Also when she tells me off, then she doesn’t really want to talk to me and walks away? There was like an, ‘Oooooh.’ I was like, ‘This is great fun.’”

When Newton was first cast as the Bridgerton family’s third-eldest son, he had no idea if the show would last long enough to reach his character’s romance—even with the support of Shonda Rhimes and devoted built-in fan base for Julia Quinn’s popular books. But after two blockbuster seasons and a Queen Charlotte spin-off, all eyes turned to the series’ wallflowers, whose connection has been baked into the show from the very first episode. “It felt like the right time to tell this love story,” says Newton. “If we’d waited for another season, I think viewers would’ve been fed up at the fact that he still doesn’t see her. And they’d be frustrated that she’s still chasing him. So it felt like the perfect moment.”

Both Colin and Penelope enter their spotlight season keen to transform themselves. She ditches her citrus-colored gowns and tight poodle curls for an emerald green ensemble and Jessica Rabbit–esque mermaid waves, resulting in an electric descent-down-the-staircase scene that Colin can’t help but notice. But Colin’s new appearance (“Brother, under what foreign sun did you apparently get so sturdy?” Benedict, played by Luke Thompson, quips in the premiere) takes place off-screen. “Last season, he was this awkward coming-of-age guy who hadn’t quite found his place in the world, and all of a sudden, he’s back with this swagger and confidence,” showrunner Jess Brownell previously told Vanity Fair. “Luke just really nailed it, figured out how to also imbue that performance with depth. Because obviously, if you’re denying a certain part of who you really are and coming back with a whole new persona, there’s still parts of you that are under the surface.”

That starts with addressing Colin’s season two finale promise to some fellow bachelors that he “would never dream of courting Penelope Featherington.” Says Newton, “It puts them on an even playing field. I love that she’s always idolized him and thought of him as this perfect human that she is madly in love with, but she sees that he’s flawed, and that he can be obnoxious and arrogant at times, and it really brings him off this pedestal. Then they can start to begin this rollercoaster of a journey to finally find each other.”

Narratively, it makes sense that Colin would publicly disdain the idea of dating Penelope—it gives a dramatic thrust to their own season, where she can confront him. He, in turn, offers to give her husband-hunting lessons. But how did Newton justify that harsh moment as an actor? “We wanted to play that sense of him feeling lost,” he says. “He really doesn’t fit in with being one of the lads, and we see that again this season. We also talked about [the fact] that he’d had a few drinks with the boys. It’s like that thing of when someone really tries to fit in and just says something so rogue.”

Newton continues, “It’s difficult even now to talk about, because it does come from a place of truth, but he just doesn’t mean it in that nasty way. He genuinely thinks, She is one of my best friends, if not my best friend. She’s best friends with my sister. She’s always been there. So he basically wants to say, ‘I wouldn’t court her, but I care for her more than anyone I know.’ But with the environment that he’s in, it comes out in a way that seems sort of obnoxious and rude.”

At this point, Newton is used to clarifying Colin’s less defendable dialogue. Take his character’s second-season vow to avoid women after nearly being bamboozled by season one suitor Marina Thompson (Ruby Barker). When Penelope asks if she and Colin can still converse under his new oath, he replies, “You’re Pen; you do not count. You’re my friend.” Of course, he meant that Penelope exists in an entirely separate plane from all other women (complimentary), but it was interpreted as confirmation that Colin would never see her in a feminine light.

“You know what? I’ve always said that he’s not very eloquent,” says Newton. “He doesn’t have a way with words like other characters do. And I actually love that because then when we do have those moments of real honesty, and it comes from the heart, it means more because he’s not just using this repertoire of words that he’s been able to use on his travels.”

He then teases a scene from the back half of season three, which premieres June 13, in which his character fumbles a group guessing game. “Colin is just terrible at it,” Newton says with a laugh. “And I think it’s so brilliant that he has all these qualities of being romantic and charming and kind and generous, but when it comes to his wits and his intellect, that’s Pen’s game. And he loves that about her.”

The first half of Bridgerton season three culminated in a steamy carriage ride in which Colin desperately hopes his lessons have not resulted in an engagement between Penelope and Lord Debling. “If you wanted to show someone that had never seen the show before the essence of everything that [it] represents, you really could just put that one scene there,” Newton says. “It’s his romantic confession of love, but then he’s insecure because he doesn’t get the initial response that he [expects]. Then it’s sexy, then it’s romantic, but then they laugh—all in the space of five minutes. It’s just so beautifully written.”

At one point, Colin admits to seeing Penelope in his dreams, precisely the place he once declared she would never be. “There was a different energy on set that day,” says Newton. “We were locked in a carriage together with cameras outside. So it felt kind of real. It did feel intimate. It’s very honest.” The heated encounter, which is ripped straight from Quinn’s Romancing Mister Bridgerton, ends with a decent proposal of Colin’s own: “For God’s sake, Penelope Featherington, are you going to marry me or not?”

Says Newton, “That’s one of Nic’s favorite moments. She always says that to me, whenever we’ve watched it, ‘I love that [moment] when you decide [to propose].’ It just represents their relationship. He’s done the declaration of love, he’s been open and honest about it. And then the comedy of it is just brilliant.”

There’s a mid-carriage moment when Colin believes that Penelope does not return his romantic feelings. Somehow, the character still has no idea that she has been in love with him from the second they met as children. Confirmation of her long-held affection is coming in the second half of season three. It’s a scene Newton cherishes, “because it so easily could have been left out,” he explains. “It could have been that they’ve now connected, share these feelings for each other, and she doesn’t need to tell him. But it’s a real journey of them opening up and being completely themselves with each other. That’s the thing that really connects the two of them, is that she loves him for all the qualities that he thought he had to hide and disguise—all the silly little things that he thought that his travels sort of eliminated. Now, he can kind of reset.”

In the hours before Colin and Penelope finally careen out of the friend zone, it is Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell), all-knowing matriarch, who gently prods her son to let his façade fall. “I do not blame you for putting on armor lately,” she says, “but you must be careful that the armor does not rust and set so you might never be able to take it off.”

These words will continue to ring true in the third season’s remaining episodes, which delve into what happens after the first blush of happily ever after—from fallout with Eloise (Claudia Jessie) to the shadow of Penelope’s secret life as gossip columnist Lady Whistledown. “They just keep taking layers off this season, both physically and emotionally,” Newton tells VF. “We need to really uncover everything that’s been felt over the last however many years they’ve known each other now.”

Their royal-tour-esque press run has taken the cast from tea parties in Australia to Romeo and Juliet’s balcony in Verona, Italy, and next, Brazil. It’s exciting—and for both Coughlan and Newton, a lot to process. “Often I could see when he was drained from being around lots of people—in the ballroom scenes, when there are 200 extras and 30 actors and then 150 crew, that’s overstimulating to me, and it’s overstimulating to him,” Coughlan told Town & Country. “So we would look at each other and nod, and we’d go back to our trailers and just recharge the batteries. We both knew we needed that. It was quite nice to have someone who got that and felt the same. We didn’t have to explain it to one another.”

I ask Newton when he thinks their staunch support of one another proved most valuable during filming. “It was the mirror scene,” says Newton, mentioning a sexy encounter blown out of a throwaway line in the book. (We won’t see it until the second half of season three premieres, but fans are already buzzing about its inclusion in the series.) “Nic and I always talk about how it’s not only intimacy scenes that are exposing, particularly with the comedy side of stuff that has to be brave and bold,” he says. But with this scene, there was no denying that the longtime costars would be seeing each other almost fully nude.

The sequence was filmed over three days, the first of which mainly centered on Coughlan’s Penelope in a state of undress. “So I remember my focus was supporting Nic and making sure that she felt comfortable on set and in that environment,” says Newton. “It’s closed sets, so there’s not loads of crew there, but there is a crowd of people around us while we’re going to expose ourselves. I just wanted her to feel supported and safe.”

He continues, “We swapped the next day, and then it was my turn, and I completely got that from her. The whole show feels like that and even now, doing a press tour together is another shared experience. It’s like these different stages that we’ll go through together, and we can only understand how each other feels.” Plus, they’re satisfied with how their sexier scenes turned out. “We’re both really happy with it,” says Newton. “Nic’s said how proud she is of those scenes, and you watch them and expect to not enjoy them and think, ‘Oh, I don’t want to see myself in that way.’ But I think we just stayed so true to the story.”

While in the throes of Bridgerton’s 10-month-long filming process, Newton turned 30—a milestone that’s now inextricably linked to his trajectory as Colin. “There definitely were parallels in what was happening in my career, and my personal life,” he says. “It felt like I went into this chapter of Colin becoming a man and stepping into adulthood. And although maybe I should have done that long ago in my 20s, I definitely felt like I was stepping into that being 30.”

When discussing the ways art imitated life, Newton resists the urge to navel-gaze. “There are always weird things that kind of seep in, and I hate that it does, because it sounds just a bit lame,” he says with a sheepish smile. “It just sounds like an actor-y thing to say, but he came back with a sense of confidence and swagger, and I started to feel more confident in myself.”

“The flip side of that,” he says, “is that I then did a play immediately afterwards”—Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things in London—“and played a really insecure, nerdy library guard. Immediately, that started trickling into my day-to-day life, and I was tripping over things and being awkward when I saw friends. And I was like, ‘God, what’s going on?’ So I need to learn to get better at the detachment there. But it’s also what I love about the job.”