LONDON — Jonathan Bailey has thought a lot about Tupperware. Not necessarily around its ability to retain food, though recently that feature has served the actor well as he moved from production to production, but more so how he has also squeezed various elements of his life into what feel like small, slightly misshapen boxes.
Compartmentalizing like this is “not the most comfortable thing to do, especially if you’re coming out of a pandemic,” Bailey, 33, said in a recent interview. But to survive, he added, it has become necessary.
This necessity has emerged as Bailey quickly became one of the breakout stars of ‘Bridgerton’, Netflix’s hugely popular romantic period drama. The show combines slightly subversive traits—female characters have intellectual conversations and orgasms, and the cast includes people of color—with scorching love affairs. The recently released second season focuses on Bailey’s Anthony Bridgerton as he searches for a wife, then meets his match in Kate (played by Simone Ashley). Netflix says it’s broken view recordsand Anthony Bridgerton fan pages are now polluting the internet.
However, Bailey does not bask in the sudden acceleration of his fame. Instead, he’s following the advice given to him at age 23, he said, by theater director Nicholas Hytner: Always keep working. Currently, that means he’s surrendering himself to a London West End audience almost every night of the week: he stars in ‘Cock’, a play by Mike Bartlett that explores sexual orientation and identity through the story of a doomed romance between two men – one of whom falls in love with a woman.
In recent weeks, Bailey has been on stage most nights promoting ‘Bridgerton’. The stress of doing both “overwhelm each other and cancel each other out in a way,” he said.
The production of “Cock” was also plagued with difficulties: Taron Egerton, the other star on the show’s bill, passed out on stage, contracted Covid-19 and then stopped production altogether, citing “personal reasons” . Most recently, Jade Anouka, Bailey’s other opponent, also tested positive for the coronavirus, meaning: Bailey performed with two understudies.
Through it all, Bailey persevered. In a recent performance, he moved with the solid grace of a dancer and deftly dealt with a drunken bouncer who disagreed with a monologue about whether sexual orientation was genetic. After taking a beat, Bailey looked straight at the audience and held his next line as if he were on the heckler.
“It’s exciting when an audience feels they can react however they want because it means something animalistic is going on,” Bailey said of the incident.
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The theater is Bailey’s acting house, and he writes that the “alchemy” of “Bridgerton” is due in part to the fact that so many actors, including Adjoa Andoh, Luke Thompson, and Ruth Gemmell, have a background in the theater.
Growing up in Wallingford, an affluent town between London and Oxford, Bailey described himself as a ‘creative and expressive child’ who was passionate about ballet and knew from an early age that he wanted to be an actor.
He was cast in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “A Christmas Carol” when he was 8, after being scouted in a local drama class. From then on, Bailey described his career as a “slow career”: At the age of 15, he starred in his first major feature, “Five Children and It,” and landed a contract with an agency. At the age of 23 he performed in “Othello” at the National Theater in London, and finally he was convinced that he could act. And when he was 25, he made a name for himself in Britain as one of the protagonists in the popular crime show ‘Broadchurch’.
Marianne Elliott, Bailey’s director on ‘Cock’, describes him as a daring performer. “He’s the nicest person you could ever meet,” she said. “But when he acts, he can have an edge, which can feel dangerous in a great way. An unpredictability.” The pair first collaborated on a sex-swapped production of the Stephen Sondheim musical “Company,” which won Bailey an Olivier award in 2019.
Sondheim, Elliott said, was charmed by Bailey. Three days before he died last year, Elliott told Sondheim that Bailey would star in “Cock.” Sondheim “literally stopped in his tracks, closed his eyes, put his hand on his chest and said, ‘Be still my beating heart,'” Elliott said.
Personally, Bailey was charmingly serious. Seated in the plush elegance of a central London hotel and dressed comfortably in shorts, a gray T-shirt and a snug jacket, he had a much softer demeanor than the smoldering, silent fury that evoked much of Anthony Bridgerton’s search for a woman defined.
“It wasn’t until I did season 2 that I realized exactly what it takes” to transition into a leading role, Bailey said. “In the Tupperware sense, you really have to get into that big Tupperware box.”
The younger male actors who play Anthony’s brothers may well run their own “Bridgerton” seasons in the future, which is why Bailey wrote a guide for them that could be called “How to Survive Falling in Love for 82 Million Households.” he said via email. It was designed to help them “maintain a sense of sanity and balance” on set, he said, and covered the practicalities of working with the crew and who to talk to if they felt things were going down. did not run smoothly.
When asked if he sees himself as a mentor, Bailey protested. “Whatever Bridgerton sibling it is, I’m having conversations that hopefully make them feel solid and prepared,” he said, still sounding like a mentor.
Nicki van Gelder, who has been Bailey’s agent since he was 15, laughed when he heard about this reluctance. Bailey, she said, has a “generosity toward other actors,” and is a particularly important role model for some of the less established actors in her books, Van Gelder said, because they don’t hide his sexuality. “I think that definitely helped younger actors who aren’t sure” to come out publicly, she said. “I have a few younger actors I’ve talked to about it. They said, “Jonny’s gone, okay?” And I said, ‘Absolutely.’”
In his acceptance speech for Olivier, Bailey spoke passionately about the importance of LGBT representation. “If I can fill spaces that I didn’t have growing up, I think that’s really brilliant,” he said.
After his work on ‘Bridgerton’ and in ‘Cock’, Bailey said he is excited ‘as he reflects on my next projects and how I can step into different versions of my understanding of representation’.
In general, he tries to have “sharp instincts,” he said, when it comes to choosing work. He worked on early shows created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Michaela Coel, and prioritizes working with people he “holds in high regard, who are exciting and exciting,” he said. “And more often than not, they’ll make sure it’s a diverse cast.”
And that diversity is important to Bailey. “If you’re naturally someone who is outside of society — I can’t speak of race, of course, but in terms of sexuality and strangeness — you have that access to empathy,” he said. “And what comes with empathy is playfulness, because then you can see where the other is coming from, and you can feel safe to find the joy in that.”
“I take playfulness,” he added.
