Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey Is Giving Us the Vapors

Jonathan Bailey felt lost and didn’t know what to do with himself. It was March 2020, and for nearly a year, the British actor had been immersed on the set of Bridgerton, Netflix’s horny and ornate period drama set in a fictional and fantastical 19th-century London. The show’s debut was months away, but working on it was consuming just about every conscious moment of Bailey’s life; his usually modern, slicked-back hair had been permed into the style of his character, Lord Anthony Bridgerton, a lothario of landed gentry, with two sharp muttonchops stroked against his cheek. It was like being a part of some social experiment, he thought. A wonderful abduction in which he’d be lifted from his normal life and sent tumbling like a stray astronaut into space, crashing into a new planet.

Here, on Planet Bridgerton, gracious ringlet-haired women danced in ball gowns to string quartet covers of Billie Eilish, charming potential suitors who were fucking and flirting their way through the city, while an anonymous columnist would chronicle everybody’s secrets and stir up drama for London’s aristocracy. Until Bridgerton, Bailey’s own modest fame had stemmed from nearly three decades in British theater and television: popular prime time detective drama Broadchurch, shows from prestige talents like Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Crashing, as well as prolific spells on London’s West End stages, most notably in a gender-swapped reimagining of Stephen Sondheim’s classic Company, for which he won a best supporting actor Olivier Award.

“When you do a play, you share it with the audience every night,” says Bailey of his fondness for the stage. But then you’re done. Working on a period set like Bridgerton was all-enveloping. After season one wrapped, Bailey should have been able to rest and recharge. But weeks later, the pandemic shut down Britain and, like everyone else, he found himself stuck in that gloomy malaise.

And then Bridgerton landed like a confetti bomb posted through his front door when it hit Netflix on Christmas morning. Suddenly, Bailey was on video calls with E! News and British breakfast television from his bedroom. The first season of the Shonda Rhimes production went massive: Some 82 million households watched the show over the holiday period into January 2021, a chart-topping figure only recently surpassed by Squid Game. The show’s second season, out in March, will be loaded with the expectation of a large and attentive audience, and for Bailey, there’s an added layer of pressure: Anthony will take the center as the season’s main character. “The idea that [Bridgerton] is coming out again is a bit of a rug pull,” he says. “It’s quite scary.”

Bailey and I meet in London’s Hyde Park during the strange limbo week between Christmas and the New Year. He blends in well with his surroundings, wearing a black Gore-Tex jacket and green corduroy slacks. The signature muttonchops, which he grew himself for the show’s first season, are dialed down this time around—“a glow-up” for the character, he says with a laugh. Bailey had just returned to London after a vacation in Switzerland, though he’s spent much of his free time recently in a quiet spot in Sussex. It shielded him somewhat from the hysteria of the show’s success, which propelled its last two leads into new spheres of fame: Phoebe Dynevor, who plays Bailey’s onscreen sister, Daphne Bridgerton, will executive produce and star in the buzzy Amazon series Exciting Times. (Tabloids suggest she also dated Pete Davidson last year, shortly before his headline-stirring relationship with Kim Kardashian.) And the man who played her onscreen lover Simon Basset, Regé-Jean Page, will appear in 2023’s Dungeons & Dragons reboot.

We sit with our coffees on a bench by the Italian Gardens. At 33, Bailey doesn’t seem eager to get noticed on the street. Dispositionally, he’s one of those actors who’d rather work than be famous, who is more comfortable reciting Dickens for a small audience than he is wearing designer on the red carpet. That he’s in this position at all feels both like a fluke and completely serendipitous.

Bailey grew up in Benson, a South Oxfordshire village of fewer than 5,000 people. When Bailey was a child, his parents put him in dance classes after he was inspired by a stage version of Oliver! he’d seen at age four. He won his first part three years later, playing Tiny Tim in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Christmas Carol. (When reached for comment, the show’s director, Ian Judge, admired his success but couldn’t really remember him. “Humbling! Put that in there,” Bailey says.) Around the same time, his older sisters who’d left home for university would return some weekends, armed with stories of city nightlife. They would play Bailey pop and disco classics from a compilation CD called Dance to the Max—“queer anthems”—by artists like Freddie Mercury and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. “I’d have to go up to my room and perfect the performance,” he says, before coming downstairs to sing and dance for his family.

Historically, he’s played valuable supporting roles that bolster a show’s narrative but has rarely occupied the main spotlight. Until this season of Bridgerton, one of his only other lead television roles was in a BBC children’s show based on the life of Leonardo da Vinci. “I’ve never gone into a screen test and had the ‘That’s him!’ reaction,” says Bailey. “I’ve always crept round through the back door.”

It was during his teen years that Bailey learned how to perform as someone he wasn’t, as many queer people growing up outside of big cities do. He attended Magdalen College School in Oxford, a nearly 550-year-old institution that counts saints, sirs, and the composer Ivor Novello as past alumni. Bailey came out to family and friends in his early 20s and is, today, one of the few gay British actors working onscreen whose roles don’t seem defined wholly by their sexuality. Bridgerton has made him a sex symbol to many men and women, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. “Any actor who thinks they’re a sex symbol? Cringe,” he says.

I wonder whether his career decisions and his sexuality have stood in direct opposition to each other; if he ever felt the need to suppress that side of himself to get ahead. He recalls a story concerning a callous word of advice that someone once gave an actor friend during pilot season. “At the time he was told, ‘There’s two things we don’t want to know: if you’re an alcoholic or if you’re gay.’ ” The words stuck with Bailey. “All it takes is for one of those people in that position of power to say that, and it ripples through,” he says. “So, yeah, of course I thought that. Of course I thought that in order to be happy I needed to be straight.” The thing that’s always led Bailey’s decision-making in his career has been his own happiness, which is why it took so long for him to talk publicly about his own sexuality: “I reached a point where I thought, Fuck this, I’d much prefer to hold my boyfriend’s hand in public or be able to put my own face picture on Tinder and not be so concerned about that than getting a part.”

That instinct to stay true to himself is part of what makes him good at his job. “Jonny operates at a different voltage,” says Phoebe Waller-Bridge, his Crashing costar. “He’s a meteorite of fun with an incredible amount of energy and playfulness. Smoldering at one turn and then utterly innocent at the next, but all the time playing with this sense of untapped danger. That is the quality I love most about Jonny as a person and as a performer: his danger.”

Bridgerton is based on a series of New York Times best-selling romance novels by American author Julia Quinn, and Bailey treats the source material with the same level of tact and seriousness as he would King Lear. What might seem like a straightforward, frothy show about scandal and romance in Regency-era England harbors a deeper meaning to Bailey, specifically in playing a philanderer like Anthony. As a teenager, period dramas were a Bailey household staple, but “you never really get behind the men,” Bailey observed, “or know why they’re avoidant and toxic.” This season, Bailey gets to dig into the show’s narrative, exploring exactly why the show’s men are avoidant and toxic. Anthony yearns to settle down, but struggles to find a woman deserving of the title of Lady Bridgerton. The shots of Anthony’s postcoital buttocks and his flippant remarks about women’s inadequacies could be seen as signs of a crass and shallow character. But Bailey sees them as symptoms of a man grieving the loss of his father, and who is struggling to assume the patriarchal position. “Going into the first season, I wanted to fully break Anthony,” show creator Chris Van Dusen says, “so that we could put him back together in the second.”

Bailey, meanwhile, says that he “started to think about [Anthony’s] charm,” and specifically “what it means to be a rake, and how his anxiety and self-hatred plays into that.” Anthony also forced Bailey to, in his words, “think about love a lot.” It’s one of the few allusions to his personal life that Bailey seems to drop, almost by accident: “You put your life experiences into [the work]. What’s most interesting is not necessarily having to talk about what that is, and keeping a sense of privacy.” He’s navigated that carefully, the balance between being affable and guarded when the circumstances call for it. His Company costar, Broadway legend Patti LuPone, remembers the former most fondly. “He’s quite open as a human being,” she tells me. “I love him.”

After Bridgerton‘s release, an old friend, Company‘s Tony Award–winning director Marianne Elliott, reached out and gave Bailey what he considers one of the greatest holy-shit moments of his career: an opportunity for them to work together again. “We’d read many scripts with the specific task of finding something for Jonny Bailey,” she tells me. Eventually, they settled on Cock, premiering this spring, a scintillating, dialogue-heavy and stage-direction-less Mike Bartlett text about a man named John, his ex-boyfriend (played by Taron Egerton), and the woman that he’s fallen for.

That side of things, the award-winning work, has helped catalyze Bailey’s other holy-shit moments, which seem to be happening with more frequency. These days, producers approach him to offer roles, the days of creeping through the back door over. Oftentimes, these projects clash with Bailey’s Bridgerton schedule, and some producers will say, “No, don’t worry. We’ll wait.” I joke that it must be strange to have people waiting for him now, and Bailey retreats inside himself. Hands in his pockets, a little embarrassed. But smiling. “Yeah…I mean…that sounds…I can say that now but, you always think they’re going to move on—and it’s only for a moment!” he says sheepishly. Bridgerton is wonderful, he adds, “but in 20 years, you don’t want to be famous. You want a sustained career.”

Douglas Greenwood is a writer based in London who covers queerness, film, and pop culture.

A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2022 issue with the title “Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey Is Giving Us the Vapors.”

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ben Parks
Styled by Angelo Mitakos