The second season of “Bridgerton” proved that “you can put a queer actor as a straight romantic lead and deliver on this incredible global scale,” Jonathan Bailey says. Find out why Bailey is part of TIME's newest class of Next Generation Leaders
—the actor Jonathan Bailey could have done anything. He chose something that he knew would be a challenge. “!” Bailey says brightly, over lunch on a sunny London afternoon. A woman at a nearby table looks up, possibly scandalized.
That’s the name of the play, written by Mike Bartlett, that Bailey, 34, headlines now on the West End, in a sparse, spiky production directed by two-time Tony winner Marianne Elliott. He stars as John, a man in a long-term gay relationship who sleeps with a woman, causing a messy love triangle. It’s a talky play, but Bailey gives a muscular performance, embodying John’s inner turmoil as someone who’s so addicted to being desired that he ends up becoming kind of a—well, it’s in the title.
Bailey, who was raised in Oxfordshire, England, has been performing since he was a child; he recounts dancing to Andrew Lloyd Webber for his grandmother as a little boy. After being scouted in a ballet class, he went to work for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the age of 7, performing in plays likeHe loved theater so much that one summer as a teenager, he staged a production ofwith his friends, just for fun: “It was completely generated by passion,” he says.
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