San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
The busy life of Jonathan Bailey
With his role in ‘Bridgerton,’ the actor is discovering the pluses and minuses of transitioning into a leading role
Jonathan Bailey has been thinking a lot about Tupperware. Not necessarily around its ability to hold food — although recently, that function has served the actor well as he has moved from production to production — but more how he has also been squishing different elements of his life into what feel like small, slightly misshapen boxes.
Compartmentalizing such as this is “not the most comfortable thing to do, especially 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 fast becomes one of the breakout stars of “Bridgerton,” Netflix’s hugely popular romantic period drama. The show blends mildly subversive traits — female characters have intellectual conversations and orgasms, and its cast includes people of color — with torrid love affairs. The recently released second season focuses on Bailey’s Anthony Bridgerton as he searches for a wife, and then meets his match in Kate (played by Simone Ashley). Netflix says it has broken viewing records, and Anthony Bridgerton fan pages now litter the Internet.
Bailey, however, isn’t basking in the sudden acceleration of his fame. Instead, he is following the advice given to him at 23, he said, by theater director Nicholas Hytner: Always keep working. Currently, that means putting himself at the mercy of a London West End audience almost every night of the week: He is starring in “Cock,” a Mike Bartlett play exploring 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, while promoting “Bridgerton” during the day, Bailey was onstage most nights. The stress of doing both “overwhelm each other and cancel each other out, in a way,” he said.
The production of “Cock” has also been plagued with difficulties: Taron Egerton, the other star in the show’s billing, fainted onstage, contracted COVID-19 and then dropped out of the production altogether, citing “personal reasons.” Most recently, Jade Anouka, Bailey’s other co-star, also tested positive for the coronavirus, which means Bailey has been performing with two understudies.
Throughout it all, Bailey has persevered. In a recent performance, he moved with the solid grace of a dancer and deftly handled a drunken heckler who took issue with a monologue about whether sexual orientation was genetic. After taking a beat, Bailey looked directly toward the audience and delivered his next line as if to the heckler.
“It’s thrilling when an audience feels that they can respond as actually they want to, because it means that something animal is happening,” Bailey said of the incident.
‘He can have an edge’
The theater is Bailey’s acting home, and he credits the “alchemy” of “Bridgerton” as being partly thanks to so many of the actors — including Adjoa Andoh, Luke Thompson and Ruth Gemmell — having backgrounds in the theater.
Growing up in Wallingford, a prosperous town between London and Oxford, Bailey described himself as a “creative and expressive child” who was passionate about ballet and knew he wanted to be an actor from a young age.
He was cast in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of “A Christmas Carol” when he was 8, having been scouted in a local drama class. From there, Bailey describes his as a “slow career”: By 15, he had appeared in his first major feature film, “Five Children and It,” and was