Jonathan Bailey is still marinating in his thoughts, and they taste pretty sweet. Top notes of red wine, he says.
These are busy times for the witty British heartthrob. He’s speaking over Zoom from Malta, where he’s filming the next “Jurassic World” installment. And two days prior, he received his first Emmy nomination for his supporting turn on Showtime’s “Fellow Travelers.”
What’s lingering in Bailey’s mind after reaching such a huge milestone? “The nature of the story, and how that story’s come to be told,” he says of Ron Nyswaner’s limited series, a decades-spanning gay drama that’s chock-full of steamy sex scenes. For him, the Emmy nod is “an acknowledgment of [the show] meaning something much bigger.”
The 36-year-old actor radiates humility and surges with pride for his collaborators; “Fellow Travelers” also picked up nominations for lead actor Matt Bomer and for Nyswaner’s writing. Bailey believes the fact that executive producer Robbie Rogers was able to get the project on television at all is a “brilliant signifier” of changing times. He feels lucky to have been the right person for the job. And after a couple of decades in the industry, the actor’s star is about to go supernova.
Childhood stage work and gigs on 2000s teen TV shows led to roles on acclaimed series like ITV’s “Broadchurch” and Channel 4’s “Crashing.” He nabbed an Olivier in 2019 for his performance in Marianne Elliott’s West End revival of “Company.” Households on the other side of the Atlantic learned his name in 2020 when he courted lockdown audiences as Anthony, the strident head of the titular family on Netflix’s period-romance smash “Bridgerton.”
Then came the game-changing “Fellow Travelers.” Bailey plays the idealistic Tim Laughlin, a closeted congressional staffer who pursues a clandestine relationship with another man amid the witch hunts of McCarthy-era Washington. The actor is keeping up that momentum in the coming months with part one of Jon M. Chu’s highly anticipated film adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked” (out Nov. 22), followed by the fourth “Jurassic World” in 2025.
“Fellow Travelers” is a fitting inflection point for Bailey, considering it reflects aspects of his own gay identity. Tim’s story also illuminates a thread connecting the actor’s work, both in and out of character: always embracing the truth, shame be damned.
Born in Wallingford, England, Bailey made a beeline for the arts as a kid when he began studying music and ballet. After getting a taste of performing at a young age, he secured an agent when he was a teenager. Even now, he feels the sense of joy and wonder he discovered in those early days.
He chose not to attend drama school, instead throwing himself into professional theater, where he encountered the performance process in its most essential form. “You start with your own instincts, and then you share with others in the room in real time,” Bailey says. “You academically approach text, then you emotionally explore it. Then, you physically put it on its feet.”
Theater taught him to be observant. In rehearsals, he witnessed actors being brilliant and bold, but also making crucial mistakes. Weeks of rehearsing helped him learn how to spend time with a character as he watched his castmates play against type and expand themselves through performance. Those lessons both tested and encouraged him, and they’ve carried him throughout his career.
Since then, Bailey has gotten the chance to see plenty of giants at work. He reverently discusses performing Stephen Sondheim’s music alongside Patti LuPone in “Company” and reciting Shakespeare opposite Ian McKellen in the Chichester Festival Theatre’s 2017 production of “King Lear.”
His contemporaries also made for great teachers. He worked with Phoebe Waller-Bridge on “Crashing” and Michaela Coel on “Chewing Gum”—two certified television geniuses whose creative successes Bailey likens to the magnesium flame of a meteor. It’s an apt comparison—Waller-Bridge called him “a meteorite of fun” in a 2022 interview with GQ. (“I think I’ve always been quite naughty,” he says playfully.)
“There’s so much you take on via natural osmosis,” Bailey explains. “It’s what you watch and how you interpret things.”
For example, he thinks that every actor should see Sandy Dennis’ Oscar-winning turn as Honey in Mike Nichols’ 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Her performance whet his curiosity about the craft: “She is so fluid. I mean, that might be the most exposing answer I’ve given about what my inner world is like.”
Bailey’s technique is rooted in music. He plays piano and clarinet, and he approaches acting like an instrument, too. When reading a script for the first time, he experiences his character’s arc as the phrases in a song. “The way my brain works is that I see the images of what they’re doing,” he says. “When I say ‘phrasing,’ it’s like, how you get from that image to this image.”
When he was playing the bottled-up Anthony on “Bridgerton,” Bailey found inspiration in songs by Echo and the Bunnymen and Nirvana. While filming “Fellow Travelers” in Toronto, he went on long walks while listening to expansive pop music to help him explore Tim, a character whose energy radiates outward.
Considering Bailey’s process plays like a song, connoisseurs of his work might notice a motif. Sam from “Crashing,” a party boy Bailey calls “a wild, untamed animal in a tiny little cage,” aggressively maintains a facade of heterosexuality while pining for his male housemate Fred (Amit Shah). On Season 2 of “Bridgerton,” Anthony locked himself into a prison of duty and a loveless engagement to avoid acknowledging his desire for the fiery Kate Sharma (Simone Ashley).
“[Matt Bomer and I] sort of hit the ground running, knowing exactly what was going to be required but also how to communicate throughout it. It felt immediately quite safe.”
Tim of “Fellow Travelers” is the latest in a series of sharply drawn characters confronting the tension between their assigned roles and their personal truths. Viewers first meet a straitlaced rule-follower whose Catholic piety is only matched by his loyalty to the infamous Senator Joseph McCarthy. All that changes when he crosses paths with Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Bomer), a crystal-eyed, debonair State Department official. Their respective closets combust on contact, and they enter into a forbidden love affair just as McCarthy’s Lavender Scare has begun purging queer people from the halls of government.
Bailey’s interior work tends to be more emotional than cerebral, but he’s a generous conversation partner who’s always game to riff on the deep stuff. Whether it’s yearning, going against expectations, or facing high stakes, the phrasing is what draws him in.
He finds a lot of gorgeous notes to play across the eight episodes of “Fellow Travelers” as the action moves from the 1950s to the ’80s, making pit stops along the way. While Hawk settles for a life of straight domesticity, Tim hurtles through a sexual and political awakening: The Beltway boy becomes an activist priest who refuses to diminish himself, especially when the AIDS crisis begins to rip his community apart.
Bailey loved being inside Tim’s head; in fact, the actor thinks of him as a hero. After experiencing the isolation of his secret relationship with Hawk, he opens himself up to the world: He comes out, moves to San Francisco, cobbles together a found family, and builds a life as his true self.
“Ron Nyswaner has spoiled Matt and me for the operatic detail that existed between [our characters],” Bailey says, “and also with Tim’s political fervor: the truth and the honesty that he demands of himself and the world around him, and the grappling with anything that is an obstacle to his own and other’s happiness.”
You can’t talk about “Fellow Travelers” without discussing its rapturous sex scenes—and not only for titillation’s sake, though the kinky encounters between Tim and Hawk certainly call for smelling salts. These sequences gave Bailey the opportunity to commit authentic queer intimacy to the screen, which members of the LGBTQ+ community rarely come across as they search for ways to understand their identities.
The trust between Bailey and Bomer informed everything they did onscreen. Before filming those scenes, the two actors talked through their approach at a café (Goldstruck Coffee on Cumberland Street in Toronto—a ribald little detail that still makes Bailey laugh). The filming itself was incredibly technical, and the actors worked with an intimacy coordinator on set. “We sort of hit the ground running, knowing exactly what was going to be required but also how to communicate throughout it,” Bailey says. “It felt immediately quite safe.”
He sensed an exciting opportunity to tell a story about transformative love amid the “wild, oppressive moment” of the Lavender Scare, dismissing any reservations about the explicit nature of the material. “Honestly, this is exactly why this show is going to be brilliant,” he remembers thinking.
The series’ milestone dramatic moments, with buttons still done up and no skin showing, carried that same sense of significance. No matter how much Tim grew over the course of his arc, Bailey says that his bond with Hawk remained an “extraordinary, material thing.”
This summer, the actor made a very Tim move when he founded the Shameless Fund, a charity that supports LGBTQ+ causes under the tagline: “Raising cash. Erasing shame.” The initiative grew directly out of his acting work—first inspired by the platform afforded to him by “Bridgerton” and further influenced by his experience on “Fellow Travelers.”
Playing Tim—or, as Bailey puts it, spending “five months doing a dissertation on queer oppression and liberation”—catalyzed his thoughts about the people who created a world where such a show could even exist. “I think in ‘Fellow Travelers,’ it’s so clear what Tim wants,” he says. “But as the world around him develops, you realize there’s so much that he can’t have, but that he can help change.”
“When you’re exhausted, you have to rely on technique. Technique does get you over the finish line, and you can deliver a performance that is honest and tell the story effectively and truthfully.”
Bailey sees that progress playing out in the next generation. He has a small role on the upcoming third season of Netflix’s queer YA hit “Heartstopper” as a dreamy academic who’s the celebrity crush of the series’ protagonist, Charlie (Joe Locke). Based on creator Alice Oseman’s graphic novel series, the show has found a passionate following of young LGBTQ+ fans.
When he watched “Heartstopper” for the first time, Bailey remembers wondering what it would have been like to see such representation on television when he was growing up. “I was so celebratory of it,” he says. “But it was obviously kind of a melancholic watch for people above a certain age, because it allowed them to grieve what they didn’t have.”
Having conquered the Regency and Cold War periods on the small screen, Bailey’s blockbuster era is imminent. He’s playing dashing love interest Fiyero in the “Wicked” films (based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel), singing and dancing alongside Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. It’s a perfect fit for the actor’s particular lens: “Musically and theatrically, I understand it massively.”
Since “Wicked” came with its own well-known songs to study, Bailey spent a lot of time with
composer-lyricist Stephen Schwartz’s music in his ears rather than Kurt Cobain’s. He explored Fiyero’s interiority through the musical theater form itself: What does the act of singing express for him?
And for a character whose signature number is called “Dancing Through Life,” what metaphorical direction are his steps leading him in?
Bailey sees Fiyero as part of the same club as Tim, Anthony, and Sam, as the heightened
world of Oz sends him on a journey of radical transformation. “I think about where he starts and where he ends up; he’s literally a changed person,” the actor says. “I savored the arc over
two films.”
Next year, Bailey will become an action star in Gareth Edwards’ next installment of “Jurassic World” opposite Scarlett Johansson. Though details have yet to be announced, including the movie’s title, production is well underway; Bailey just finished filming in Thailand before shooting moved to Malta. A few days before we spoke, he was interacting with a fake blue-screen dinosaur (which is only a spoiler if you thought Hollywood has actually been cloning big reptiles this whole time).
But Bailey is still keeping his theater muscles toned. Next year, he’s starring as the titular
monarch in Nicholas Hytner’s production of Shakespeare’s “Richard II” at London’s Bridge Theatre. “I have to go and sharpen up,” he says of returning to the stage. “You feel so sharp and dexterous at the end of a theater run—but also, you know, without a soul. Carcass levels of absolute exhaustion.”
Bailey lights up at the prospect of getting back onstage and experiencing the kinetic energy between the actors, crew, and director. He believes that the emotional and intellectual rigor of theater leads to a tight, specific piece of work. It’s an art form that requires continuous creation night after night.
This stamina comes in handy in front of a camera, too. “When you’re exhausted, you have to rely on technique,” he explains. “Technique does get you over the finish line, and you can deliver a performance that is honest and tell the story effectively and truthfully.”
Until then—and until he’s back on set with those fake dinosaurs—he’s going to soak up
that Emmy-nomination afterglow for a little while longer.
“I’m actually going to go and have another glass of wine to celebrate,” he says.
This story originally appeared in the Aug. 15 issue of Backstage Magazine.
