Jonathan Bailey Is Breaking Hollywood’s Rules — and Winning

“I love him even more, now!” yells a young woman to her friends and anyone else within a 20-foot radius while exiting the Bridge Theatre in London after an afternoon showing of Richard II in early May. The friends reply in unison, “I knowww.”

The group then hurries to the stage door, where they hope to see the object of their collective affection. But they won’t find him there. A month into the show’s run, its star had to stop greeting audience members because of a noise complaint received by the City Council. If you’re wondering, that is not a typical problem at a matinee showing of one of Shakespeare’s more esoteric historical plays.

But this impassioned and predominantly female crowd assembled is not really here for Richard II. They have come for the man playing him: Jonathan Bailey, one of entertainment’s hottest rising stars.

Working at a steady pace since he was a kid, primarily in theater, the 37-year-old British actor broke out in Netflix’s steamy period romantic drama Bridgerton, one of the platform’s most-watched shows ever, and then last year made his big-screen Hollywood debut in the $700 million movie musical extravaganza Wicked.

It’s been a remarkably quick rise for an actor who defies a lot of the conventional wisdom about what makes a star: Despite never attending one of London’s prestige drama schools, he came up through the Royal Shakespeare Company (before Richard II, there was Othello, King Lear and King John), and he’s a proudly out actor who plays both straight and gay in both prestige and populist fare, becoming a sex symbol to both women and men.

In a business ruled by quadrants, types, lists and lanes, Bailey has taken an alternative route.

“You have to unlearn a lot of narratives about yourself that an industry tells you,” he says, including, ”If you’re gay, there’s a glass ceiling.”

Bailey has already won an Olivier for the 2018 West End revival of Company and earned an Emmy nomination for the HBO prestige drama Fellow Travelers, not to mention nabbed a fan-voted Sexiest Man Alive readers’ choice honor from People in 2024. “It’s hard to express how surprised I was every step of the way,” he says of his sudden and admittedly unforeseen mass appeal.

It seems that even as Hollywood remains confounded about how to mint new movie stars in our modern age of too much choice and too little attention, audiences still have the power to anoint their own stars. Judging by the Instagram accounts, Tumblrs, an ungodly number of TikTok fancams (44 million, per a tally on the platform) and noise complaints, Bailey is an unquestionable fan favorite.

The question looming now is where to place him in the Hollywood hierarchy of up-and-coming stars, which includes a strong U.K. contingent of Josh O’Connor, Harris Dickinson and Joseph Quinn. While audiences have made up their minds on Bailey’s star power, the industry, as is often the case, is a step behind, awaiting even further confirmation. When asked about Bailey’s potential, one studio head texts me that they are “not sure he can carry a movie on his own yet, but love him and want to see him in more and I am hopeful he becomes a star.”

That hope will be road-tested in a matter of weeks, when he co-stars in the $300 million-plus Jurassic World Rebirth, the latest go-round of Universal’s enduring multibillion-dollar franchises. Sure, he will be sharing the screen with box office heavyweight Scarlett Johansson and two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, so the burden will not be his alone. But the glow of success, and even more so the pall of failure, is always shared. So this is the kind of proving ground for an actor that’s becoming all the more rare.

Jurassic World Rebirth, out July 2, is already tracking for a monster $120 million opening weekend. And if Bailey can bring impassioned crowds to an obscure Shakespearean history (apologies to The Bard) then maybe it’s not so big a stretch to think he can get them into a movie theater.

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Perhaps it’s all as simple as Jonathan Bailey is a good hang.

When meeting for the first time about the possibility of Bailey joining Jurassic World Rebirth, director Gareth Edwards remembers spending two hours talking about pretty much everything aside from the movie, or his potential role in said movie. Nary a dinosaur was named.

“The producers called going, ‘How was it? How was he? What did he think of the role? Did he like the idea?’ And I just had to sort of like half lie, ‘Yeah he was super excited!’ ” recalls the director.

Despite both working regularly in theater and even appearing in the same television series — Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum — Cynthia Erivo didn’t meet Bailey until rehearsals for Wicked, in which they play onscreen love interests. “I keep making the mistake and saying that he went to [Royal Academy of Dramatic Art],” says Erivo. “In my head, I feel I’ve known him for such a long time that in my head we went to the same school. One day, he was like ‘Cyn, you keep telling people that we went to RADA together, but I didn’t go to RADA.’ “

Sure, many charismatic, hungry young stars know how to turn it on when they need to, especially for their fellow Hollywood travelers or the press. But Bailey has had the designation of being the best man for a half-dozen weddings. If that’s fakery, it’s also masochistic.

In fact, one of the interviews for this story happened while Bailey set up for a bachelor party — this one for the close friend he lived with during the majority of his 20s — parrying questions as he blew up a giant inflatable zebra for the pool. “Have you seen the Whitney Houston challenge?” he asks. For the ill-informed, Bailey explains that you try to nail the iconic drum hit that comes before the key change in “I Will Always Love You.” For the bachelor party, it’s been co-opted as a drinking game; Bailey also has timed the song to ensure his own success. He laughs, “Everyone else is going to be absolutely smashed.”

See: good hang. And it’s something that audiences pick up on.

As Richard, a sociopathic monarch who (in this staging) snorts coke while calling for higher taxes on the commonfolk and luxuriates on the hospital bed that his uncle just died in, Bailey plays the part with such glee and abandon that, by the end of the show when Richard is in a body bag, the audience, despite all better judgment, thinks, “Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.”

“He’s just instantly likable,” assesses Edwards. “I don’t know if he hates people saying that about him, but it’s such a great trait because the biggest problem a filmmaker has when casting or writing a film is whether an audience will care about this person. If, within the first scene, while hardly saying anything, you go, ‘I like this guy,’ it’s worth its weight in gold.”

Part of Bailey’s appeal is that even when he’s playing highbrow, he seems somehow rooted — and that much is true. When Richard II started rehearsals, Bailey, who lives in the English coastal region of Sussex, planned to stay at a central London hotel. But the schedule of hotel to theater to hotel, rinse repeat, left him drained, he says: “I felt like the fish in Blackfish. My dorsal fin, well and truly, started to fall to the left.” So he started crashing with childhood friends — he maintains many — and cycling miles to the theater.

Bailey grew up in rural Oxfordshire, the youngest of four, all older sisters. It was in an after-school ballet class where he was scouted at age 7 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, landing in a 1995 production of A Christmas Carol. (“It’s really easy to spot the one boy out of 400 girls,” Bailey says with a laugh.) He spent a chunk of his childhood traveling between home and London, playing Gavroche in Les Misérables and Prince Arthur in King John, performing four shows a week but never missing any class.

By the time high school came around, Bailey traded dance and gymnastics for soccer and rugby. He was planning on attending university when, he says, “It just so happened that the day of my last A-level exam, I took over for the production of Beautiful Thing that Andrew Garfield had done.”

This is how Bailey became a learn-on-the-job type, with a near religious reverence for performing, if not the formal higher education of many with whom he’s shared the stage. Outside of theater, those jobs have included a children’s BBC series about Leonardo da Vinci, the pre-Fleabag comedy from Phoebe Waller-Bridge Crashing and the Olivia Colman-led Broadchurch.

Then came Bridgerton.

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“I got sent it and I nearly didn’t audition,” says Bailey of the Shonda Rhimes-produced Netflix juggernaut. The request came in during his second-to-last week performing Company, the 2018 gender-swapped revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical. After six months of shows, with three months of rehearsals before that, all Bailey wanted to do was disappear for a while. He remembers, “At that time, I was really done. I just needed to go and experience the world.”

After it hit his inbox, Bailey forwarded the project to a friend he thought would be a better fit and had no plans of putting anything on tape himself until his agent, with whom he has worked since he was 15, advised him to audition for just one of the three parts he was sent. “I read for the Duke,” says Bailey of the role that would go on to be played by Regé-Jean Page.

He left shortly after for a California road trip, traveling from San Francisco down Pacific Coast Highway, with a side trip to Coachella for good measure. Since he was on the West Coast, he was told to stop by the offices of Shondaland, which led to him being cast as Anthony, the attractively moody and attractively attractive eldest sibling of Bridgerton House.

By the time the show debuted in 2020, Bailey had left London and moved back home, hanging out with his grandmother and, like the rest of the world, not doing much else. It was the first Christmas of the COVID lockdown, and Bridgerton — “the trinity of Shondaland, period drama, Netflix,” as Bailey assessed it — would be one of the final series that was able to finish filming before the pandemic. He says, “I remember just being like, ‘Wow, this is going to be massive.’ ”

Bridgerton, which is known for high drama interspersed with some sexually explicit scenes, was the biggest debut for an original series on the streaming service at the time, and Anthony — with obvious shades of Mr. Darcy (but a Mr. Darcy who gives oral) — quickly became a fan favorite. “The show itself has such a specific style and structure, and I noticed that within that world, Jonny was able to make bold, interesting and funny choices that gave the more serious scenes a real sense of life,” Luke Newton, Bailey’s onscreen Bridgerton brother, says over email.

As is the Hollywood way, actors with a hit on their hands are advised to capitalize on that momentum quickly and plot the next career move. But Bailey already knew what was next; he was locked into a second Bridgerton season where Anthony’s love life would be the central story.

“When you go and film something like Bridgerton, and you say goodbye to your friends, your family, it’s all-encompassing,” says Bailey. “I read an interview with Walton Goggins where he was saying he was glad that even now White Lotus didn’t happen to him 10 years ago because he wouldn’t have known what to do with that. And I just feel that maybe Bridgerton was just a smidge quicker than I was prepared for,” admits the actor. ”Going back to theater, working with people that I know, that has helped.”

For Bailey, getting back onstage is not only familiar but restorative. After he wrapped the eight-month shoot of Bridgerton‘s second season, he signed up for the West End revival of the drama Cock. Ten days into the run, Bridgerton‘s second season premiered.

As Bailey remembers it, “Suddenly people were just coming. The crowd was changing every night.” A good portion of the audience was now coming to see Anthony Bridgerton, as much as they were the play. “It’s different if they’ve just been spending eight hours with you on TV.”

All the same, Bailey says he has no plans to leave Bridgerton.

“I’ve never been someone who’s like, ‘Thanks, bye.’ It’s not in my nature,” he says of remaining on the show, content with being a supporting player in coming years — the central plot revolves around a new character each season — even as his star continues to rise outside of the show. “There’s a real sense of brotherly pride I feel in it,” says Bailey, who recently wrapped the show’s fourth season, due out in 2026. “I was filming a wedding on a Monday morning,” he stops himself short, likely considering the long arm of the Netflix publicity machine: “People know that people get married in Bridgerton — that’s not a spoiler, right?”

While acknowledging that there may be a future season when the scheduling doesn’t work or the storyline may not require Anthony, he’s been happy to continue watching his co-stars from the wings: “I look forward to, in another however many years, when we’ve done the eighth season to sit around and be like, ‘Look what we all did together.’ “

Bailey also thinks about Bridgerton from the audience’s perspective. “I know how much I love long-running series,” he says. “I know how important familiarity of character and story and consistency is in these long-running series.”

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In Jurassic World Rebirth, which takes place five years after the franchise’s last film fronted by Chris Pratt, dinosaurs have proved ill-equipped for the modern environment and have begun to die out, except along the equator. A pharmaceutical company sponsors a mission — executed by Johansson’s skilled covert operative, Ali’s fixer and Bailey’s paleontologist — to collect genetic materials from the remaining dinos.

The first time Bailey, as Dr. Henry Loomis, touched a dinosaur on set, it was an emotional experience. Yes, the dinosaur was just a giant blue cardboard tube with a crewmember named Colin inside, but he says it was emotional nonetheless.

Edwards took a handheld camera, whispering direction to Bailey as he approached the dinosaur (Colin) in a grassy field in Thailand while the crew played orchestral music over the set’s loudspeakers. It was a small, improvised moment within what can be the rigid nature of a blockbuster shoot. When Edwards called “cut,” he turned to his first assistant director, who had tears in his eyes.

“Isn’t that what all humans are really trying to find in their life, the equivalent of their passion in its natural environment?” offers Bailey of the outsized emotional impact of the scene. “It doesn’t get more pure than that.”

The same might be said of Bailey’s own relationship to acting. “He loves working. Loves it!” says Erivo. “He’s always searching for something, but he’s playful at the same time, so the air is always light when you’re around him.”

Wicked opened the door to Jurassic. While Edwards was casting his dino film, the studio was putting the final touches on the fervently anticipated musical adaptation. “Dancing Through Life,” Bailey’s solo number as the devil-may-care Prince Fiyero, in which he tumbled through a moving tunnel of bookcases, was shaping up to be a standout sequence in what was looking to be a standout movie. Universal suggested Bailey as a possibility to join ScarJo.

Edwards wasn’t among the masses who binged Bridgerton. But his girlfriend was. “I mentioned Jonathan Bailey was someone they’re talking about. Her eyes lit up and she was like, ‘That’s fantastic! Is that for real? Is that going to happen?’ ” The filmmaker figured this was a good sign.

Bailey — who says the first movie that he remembers seeing in theaters with his family was Jurassic Park when he was 5 — was with his family when he received the news. “It was not really an experience I’ve had before, an assistant that goes — ” Bailey then drops into a pitch-perfect Southern California accent: ” ‘Hey, Jonny, I have …’ ” By Bailey’s count, roughly 20 names were then roll-called, from top studio brass to producers. He put the call on speakerphone so everyone could listen in. It was all very stereotypical Hollywood — except in one very major way.

Bailey has navigated his adult professional career as an out gay actor, an identity he hasn’t shied from. His early press coverage was in queer publications, and last year he launched The Shameless Fund, a charity focused on LGBTQ+ initiatives. “Being an out gay actor, historically, meant that you wouldn’t be able to play straight and there weren’t any gay parts to play, anyway,” says Bailey. “That’s obviously changed, massively.” With Jurassic, he is co-leading one of the town’s most lucrative blockbuster franchises, an area that’s had, until late, a pretty weak track record of inclusivity. It’s a reality that’s not lost on him, but it’s also one he doesn’t want to dwell on.

“There’s moments where, yes, you have to be excellent to prove that you can do it. And it’s not like I haven’t felt that. There’s the weight of history. And there’s endless brilliant people who have come before you who have changed the way that people see sexuality.” He adds, “Any sort of sense of prejudice against sexuality is something to fight against, and what better way to do that than to go and play any kind of character.”

As for what that next character is, Bailey doesn’t have an immediate answer. Right now, he is staring down the barrel of one globe-spanning press tour (Jurassic), followed quickly by another globe-spanning press tour (Wicked: For Good, out Nov. 21). He says, “I’m sure it won’t last long, but I think the idea of a few months [off] is just absolutely dreamy.”

Otherwise, he just wants to continue casting a wide net, which is what got him here in the first place: “I’ve unlearned the idea of feeling limited.”

This story appeared in the June 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.