Yahoo Movies Best of 2022 (Behind the Scenes): How Bridgerton found its very good boy, Newton the corgi
Sometimes casting can be ruff.
But in the case of Newton, the corgi belonging to Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley) on season 2 of Bridgerton, it was obvious they had a winner in Austin.
Born in 2014, Austin is a show dog who has won numerous accolades at legendary British dog show Crufts. Prior to Bridgerton, he appeared on CNN's The Windsors: Inside the Royal Dynasty as one of Queen Elizabeth's corgis in historical reenactment sequences. But the Netflix series gave him a starring role to sink his teeth into — and trainer Joanna Mayston says he took to it almost immediately, quickly becoming the biggest diva on set.
"If you did a straw poll of the cast and crew, they would agree with that," she jokes. "The demanding for food and demanding affection. He loved all of the attention. He would lap it up. He never had an attitude, just a bit of a diva."
LIAM DANIEL/NETFLIX
Mayston recommended Austin get into film and television because he possesses the qualities of a canine star. "I suggested him because he's very greedy," she explains. "He likes food, which means you can negotiate as much as you possibly can with a corgi. Having been a show dog, he's really used to traveling, used to hanging around, and he has the best temperament with people, which is really important."
Yes, you read that right. The key to Austin's appawse-worthy performance? Bribery with food. "There's a lot of sausage involved," Mayston says. "Primarily cocktail sausage, but any sausage will do. We train them with a few basic behaviors. Things like going to a mark, doing 'stays,' going with people that aren't necessarily us. A few little tricks like how to speak on command. He had to look sad with his head down, and we teach them those things, but the thing you can't teach is the temperament of the dog so we work with something we can mold through lots of positive reinforcement"
Still, much like his human costars, sometimes the role also required something that can't be taught. "Austin has personality in spades," adds Mayston. "It helps. You're looking for a dog that's at ease with themselves. They're quite comfortable, and novel things don't distress them too much. They go with the flow. There is a little bit of a special thing about the ones that are really good and really special."
Liam Daniel/Netflix Simone Ashley and Austin the corgi on 'Bridgerton'
For Austin, playing Newton was his biggest role yet, requiring him to work on and off for nearly the entirety of 2021. Mayston had to teach the cast — especially Simone Ashley, Charithra Chandran, and Shelley Conn, who portrayed the Sharma family — how to work with Austin. The process involves giving the actors treats and convincing the dog to now look to the talent as their handler, rather than Mayston.
But Austin was easily convinced to transfer his loyalty with a snack, and he particularly enjoyed the copious carriage rides on Chandran and Ashley's laps. Still, Mayston says corgis present a unique challenge when it comes to training them for the screen — they're too smart for their own good.
"They are very, very clever, so they are very, very trainable," she says. "But they are not necessarily what I would call biddable. They're not falling over themselves to please you. They're just like, 'No, I've done it. We did it twice. You want to do more takes, that's fine, but I've done it.' They can catch on to things a bit quick. So they're like, 'Oh I can do this, this, and this, but why don't I go straight to this?' You spend a lot of time trying not to let them in on the whole story. They're really challenging because they can be quite stubborn."
In Austin's case, it didn't take him long to work out that if he barked between takes, he would be fed because Mayston needed him to be quiet on set. "He knew I was going to feed him to shut him up because I didn't have time to take him away," she groans. "Between most scenes when he's not in it, he's constantly having food shoveled in his face."
Food was also a key motivating factor in training Austin to do the more demanding scenes the script called for, including barking on cue at Anthony (Jonathan Bailey) and stealing a pall mall ball during a heated Bridgerton family match.
Liam Daniel/Netflix Phoebe Dyvenor, Simone Ashley and Jonathan Bailey on 'Bridgerton'
For the barking, Austin had a natural advantage. He tends to "rev up" as Mayston puts it, meaning that the growls Newton gives Anthony (indicating to Kate that he has "poor character") are all Austin. Many times productions will have to use sound effects to achieve an effective growl, but Austin's natural rumble made such a task irrelevant.
Picking up the pall mall ball required a bit more practice. "He's not a natural ball chaser," notes Mayston. "Lots of corgis aren't that much into playing ball. He had to be taught how to pick that up because that's a very key moment. When it came time to actually shoot that, he was really good, bless him. He went out, picked it up, and trotted on as if he had stolen it. Usually, corgis are a bit like, 'You throw it, you fetch it.'"
There were also scenes that Austin didn't nail on the first take. When we first meet the Sharma family, including Newton, Mayston says he took it upon himself to trot to the bottom of the staircase and turn in the opposite direction from her to scamper out the door for some undiscovered reason.
He also proved a terrible temptation on set with his predilection for belly rubs. Mayston found herself regularly telling cast members not to pet him because of the likelihood that his fur would get stuck on their costumes and ruin a shot.
Liam Daniel/Netflix Jonathan Bailey on 'Bridgerton'
One thing Austin wouldn't do was get his paws dirty. Though Kate and Anthony roll around in the mud and Newton is the cause of Anthony's accidental dive into a lake, Austin was having none of it. "True to his royal heritage. Austin is not a fan of water or puddles or mud or filth," Mayston says. "They're just not his thing. Being low to the ground, some of the locations we went to, he could get filthy quite easily. So you had to carry him over things."
In spite of his needy tendencies, Austin was beloved by cast and crew. So will Newton return for season 3? Mayston cryptically notes that she's not at liberty to say.
But if nothing else, he certainly left his paw print on the hearts of audience members around the world.
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