If ever there was a fete for the ages, it was the Paris premiere for Bridgerton’s fourth season. The who’s who of the ton — and we are talking about the Bridgertons, the Stirlings, the Mondriches, Lady Agatha Danbury, and the queen herself — gathered inside Palais Brongniart, where guests were treated to a screening of the first episode, followed by a masquerade inside the historic 19th century building that used to house the French stock exchange.

Attendees for the first-ever premiere hosted at the venue were greeted by the voice of Julie Andrews — ahem, Lady Whistledown — who beckoned them to take their seats for an exquisite ballet performance by Paris Opera Ballet dancers Léonore Baulac and Guillaume Diop, after which Netflix Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria kicked off the evening of festivities by introducing the women who made all of this possible: executive producers Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers.

Asked what makes Bridgerton fans so unique from the followers of her other shows, Rhimes praised their intensity. “I think they might be — and I mean this in the best way — more fierce and more opinionated,” she told us before the event. “I think it’s because they love the Julia Quinn books so much, and then they’ve fallen in love with this world. So, I think they feel like it’s a bit theirs, and that’s an excellent thing for us.”

Bringing the event to Paris felt appropriate for the season Rhimes calls the most romantic yet. “This is the city of love, the city of lights,” she said. “It’s the most glamorous, amazing place. For us, this is a real treat to get to come here. And the fans here have been so incredible, so to get to come here and celebrate with those fans is wonderful.”

Eager to share the season to come with all Bridgerton devotees, Beers thinks they are in for a thrilling adventure when it comes to Benedict finally stepping into the spotlight. “Benedict is his own character, and I think we’ve all been waiting for Benedict to be in this position,” she said. “He’s the Bridgerton who is least close to choosing what he wants to be. He’s in that birth order that makes it not important. And watching him grow into this man who wants and loves something so intensely is one of the treats of my career.”

For those fans who haven’t yet read Julia Quinn’s An Offer From a Gentleman or obsessively dissected the teaser for the forthcoming season, bohemian Benedict, played by Luke Thompson, shows zero interest in the traditional path of finding a wife until a mystery woman at the masquerade hosted by his mother, Lady Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell), piques his interest to the point of obsession. “When you meet the person who challenges you and grounds you and also sort of surprises you — it’s just something that happens to him,” said Thompson. “That’s how love works, isn’t it? It just sort of happens.”

Season four allowed Thompson to discover new dimensions to his now-familiar character. “He’s a character that has a very big customer-facing side that we’ve seen for a few seasons now,” he said. “And actually, this season I thought I really would love to see what makes him angry, what makes him sad, because we really don’t get to see much of that [in previous seasons]. I think that the fun of putting a character at the center is that you get to see the whole picture.”

Oh, and what a picture it is! True to Bridgerton form, the new season is sexy, and the actors are oftentimes bare. Showrunner Jess Brownell got some hearty chuckles from the audience when describing Thompson and his on-screen love interest Yerin Ha’s most romantic scenes of the season. “This season, you’re going to see a lot of fantastic images. You’ll see dancing under a pergola. You’ll see Luke swimming in a lake. You’ll see Yerin going about the grounds of My Cottage,” she said. “The reality is that because we shoot in England, in every single one of those situations, it was absolutely freaking freezing, and our leads gave us take after brilliant take.”

Director and executive producer Tom Verica told us the chemistry between these two sizzles, even in subzero temps. “Seeing the two of them is the real flashing star of the season,” he said. “We discovered a lot through the rehearsal process. Luke and Yerin didn’t know each other, and sometimes when you have someone who’s been playing this character for a while and a new character introduced, there’s a lot of trepidation. So, we want to rehearse enough so that we’re all telling the same story but really give them the space, once we’re filming, to find their chemistry.”

Speaking of trepidations, Ha admitted that joining the world-famous franchise was quite the emotional roller coaster. “You get excited, and then you go, ‘Oh, s–t, how am I going to do this?’ And then you go, ‘Okay, maybe I can do it,’” she said. “Then you meet people, and you’re like, ‘I’m in good hands.’ Now I’m feeling really excited to celebrate what we’ve done.” Asked why pragmatic lady’s maid Sophie Baek might be fascinated with the affluent Benedict Bridgerton (aside from his rather dashing looks), Ha said, “He is a bit of an enigma, and she also sees qualities in him that maybe she possesses as well, in the sense of feeling like an outsider. He expresses that from the get-go when she meets him. Being outsiders themselves, I think that’s how they match and connect. … I think it might be love at first sight.”

Season four also welcomes a new family, for whom Sophie works as a maid, to the ton, led by their stiff, sharp-tongued matriarch, Lady Araminta Gun, played by Katie Leung, a fan favorite some might recognize from the Harry Potter franchise. Leung said Lady Gun isn’t all daggers, though: “Araminta gets the most evil of lines. But coupled with that, we get to see her humanity, which we haven’t been able to see yet, so I’m really excited for you to see that. But it just feels wrong, it feels cheeky, it feels great.”

Lady Gun’s daughter Posy, on the other hand, plays the other side of the spectrum. Isabella Wei, who plays Posy, said of the experience, “It’s so fun to play someone who’s really funny and carefree and gets things wrong all the time. It takes a lot of the pressure off.” Araminta’s other daughter, Rosamund, may take after her mother, but Michelle Mao sees her role more as “enhancing” other people’s performance, “The meaner I am, the better I make everyone else look. And I think that is an important job, and so I take pride in that. And it was also really fun just getting to roll my eyes. I’m really sorry for some of the …,” Mao paused, not wanting to give anything away. “You’ll see, I’m not very nice to her [Posy], but I enjoyed it.”

Back in the Bridgerton clan, for Eloise’s evolution this season, Claudia Jessie said that “Eloise is trying to tackle society in the only way she knows how, by coming up with some sort of a mad hat idea.” Indeed, Eloise is never one to conform, and similarly, Michaela Stirling, John Stirling’s cousin (played by Masali Baduza), also embraces being a free spirit. Baduza said that Michaela “doesn’t really conform to the society’s rules,” and it’s been “really interesting to see against the backdrop of the other women in the show who follow [those] rules.” We’ll have to wait and see what this all means for our nonconformists, but color us intrigued.

If one thing became entirely clear at the premiere, it’s that our babies of the Bridgerton family are growing up. Florence Hunt (Hyacinth Bridgerton) believes that Hyacinth and Gregory have done “a lot of maturing and growing up and all of the things they’ve longed to do for these seasons. [It’s] been really fun for us as well to watch them grow. It’s exciting to see what they were going to write into the season.” As for Gregory, Will Tilston confirms that his newfound maturity has actually found its way to Gregory’s face in the form of some chin hair! “Yes, there is chin hair. Unfortunately, it’s not that great,” he said.

The new season is not just about challenges in love. Lady Agatha Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) is on a mission to find out more about her origins. “I think what’s been interesting is to go, ‘A little girl was taken from her country to another country and had to learn how to navigate that world. What was the sky that little girl saw? What were the trees? What were the smells? What were the sounds?’ I think at a certain point, you want to fill in the jigsaw pieces of your life,” said Andoh. “For Agatha, at this point in her life, she knows she needs to get some of those different views. She needs to know who she was, and who she is.”

Yet Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) seems not quite keen on shaking up the status quo, leading to a character exploration that has fascinated both Rosheuvel and Hugh Sachs, who plays Brimsley, the queen’s right-hand man. “I think for Queen Charlotte, we dive a little deeper into her personal feelings about her friends, about her surroundings, about her existence,” said Rosheuvel. “We get to see her being a little bit more vulnerable.”

Queen Charlotte’s existential crisis even throws her confidant for a loop. “She goes to places Brimsley has never quite seen before, which is frightening because he’s completely devoted to her, and he doesn’t quite know what to do. We can’t tell you why. … But I mean, she is so brilliant,” Sachs gushes about his co-star. Their admiration is mutual, with Rosheuvel claiming it is she who has been campaigning the loudest for a Brimsley spin-off. “I was the one who started that rumor. I’m going to claim it!” she said. “Or the musical. There’s Shonda. We can ask her. Brimsley: The Musical? You heard it here first!”