Who Is Bridgerton’s Sophie Baek? Meet Yerin Ha, The Korean-Aussie Queen Joining Season 4
Tonight, Bridgerton divas, we feast! Season four drops this evening and with it, we finally get to meet Sophie Baek (Yerin Ha) — Benedict’s (Luke Newton) long-teased endgame and the Korean-Australian Cinderella bringing a bit of Sydney to the Ton.
Who is Sophie Baek in Bridgerton?
If you’ve read An Offer From a Gentleman by Julia Quinn, you’ll recognise the bones of the story: Benedict falls for a mysterious masked woman at a ball, then spends years trying to reconcile that fantasy with the very real woman in front of him who’s stuck working downstairs.
In the books, she’s Sophie Beckett — on the show, she’s Sophie Baek, a change made to nod to Yerin Ha’s Korean heritage while keeping the full Cinderella scaffolding — secret lineage, nasty stepmother, and a world that keeps reminding her she doesn’t belong in the ballroom.
Sophie isn’t just there to be sad and pretty in candlelight. Even Netflix’s character description clocks her as “plucky” and “endlessly resourceful”, and someone who struggles to trust people, which makes sense when your whole life is a structural red flag.
When PEDESTRIAN.TV asked Yerin what might surprise fans most about Sophie when she finally steps on-screen, she went straight to that inner steel: “Ooh, I guess that she has quite high morals and values for herself even though she is of lower-class status and she’s a maid. Just because somebody offers her a solution, she doesn’t take it immediately. She still has a bit of pride for herself and self-respect.”
Who is Bridgerton‘s new leading lady Yerin Ha?
Off-screen, Yerin being the one to star in this role matters. She’s a Korean-Australian actor who grew up between Sydney and South Korea, moved to Seoul as a teenager to attend an arts high school, then came back to train at NIDA before taking on theatre, Dune: Prophecy and Halo.
Years before Bridgerton, she was already saying she wanted to see diverse people playing the romantic lead and that TV can “hit a bigger platform and a bigger message” and “bubble conversation” into change.
“Hopefully there’s a time where we can actually see [people of multiple backgrounds] playing the girlfriend, the romantic lead, but in my opinion, audiences are still not used to seeing that amount of diversity on screen or stage,” she told Vogue Australia in 2019.
All of that makes the Beckett-to-Baek switch more than just a cute detail. In her first interview about the role with Tudum, Yerin explained that showrunner Jess Brownell worked with her to pick a Korean surname starting with B, and they landed on Baek, which she described as “really empowering” because “a name is the first bit of identity that you share with the world”, and changing it to fit someone who looks like her meant the role felt made for her instead of her squeezing into a preset mould.
What will Bridgerton season 4 be about?
When P.TV asked both Luke and Yerin to put a neat little bow on what this season is about, they both landed on the same axis: fantasy vs reality. Luke told us, “I think it’s like fantasy and reality. I think there’s a bit of love at first sight. Probably a bit of forbidden love maybe as well?”
Yerin added, “Forbidden love. Self-discovery. Identity.”
Luke then basically described the emotional arc we all dog-ear in our favourite romances: “You have the honeymoon period where you’re spinning this magical story together, and then you actually have to be together in the real world. And that transition’s really difficult and really revealing, and sometimes people don’t make it past that stage.”
That push–pull is baked into Benedict and Sophie’s whole dynamic. On paper, they’re a fairy-tale: masked ball, instant connection, star-crossed vibes. But in practice, there’s a guy with money and freedom, and a woman whose entire life is shaped by class and power imbalances he’s never had to think about.
If you want to catch up on what led us to this point in the Bridgerton universe, don’t worry we’ve got you covered HERE.
A fairy-tale love story in a not-so-fair world
One of the most interesting parts of Benedict and Sophie’s story is that Bridgerton finally stops pretending class is just set dressing. When I put it to them that this love story drags the show’s class politics from the background to the centre, Yerin was very clear they didn’t want to just slap a sparkly filter over it. “I think purposefully there was a shift and there was an energy shift, and it wasn’t like we were trying to lean into the fairy-tale aspect of it,” she said.
“I think we were trying to lean into more of the raw, kind of — ” and Luke jumped in with “ — Grungy, I guess you would say?”
Yerin agreed: “Yeah, just real. More this realistic viewpoint of the class disparity of the time. But I think with their love story, that’s the fairy-tale aspect of it. But we do get to see more of the downstairs, and [Luke] mentioned before — it’s seeing a lot more of the roots of the family and how it all worked.”
That’s the tension the season keeps coming back to: the gorgeous fantasy of the masquerade and the very non-fantasy reality of what happens when the masks come off and one of you has to go back to scrubbing floors.
Luke also tied that directly back to why their story feels so emotionally loaded: it’s not just external obstacles like balls and rules and mothers; it’s “big internal blocks as well as external blocks” that both characters have to work through. For Benedict, that means confronting the privilege baked into his romantic ideals; for Sophie, it means letting herself believe she deserves more than just surviving.
Season four itself is rolling out in two chunks, with Netflix dropping Part One on 29 January and Part Two on 26 February, and this writer is simply positively beside herself — for if the whispers are to be believed, dear reader, the Ton has never seen drama quite like this.
