Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey is a gay British actor who first spoke publicly about being gay in 2021 in a GQ interview, in which he reflected on the experience of living openly versus semi-privately and the particular difficulty of being gay in a still-heteronormative industry. He had come out to his family and close circle years earlier -- including while playing Jamie, a gay man, in the Menier Chocolate Factory's gender-flipped production of Sondheim's Company (2018), for which he won an Olivier Award -- but speaking directly on the record represented a meaningful public step. Bailey's career accelerated dramatically from there: he became a global heartthrob as the rakish Anthony Bridgerton in Bridgerton (2020) and delivered what many consider his career-best work as Timothy Laughlin in the acclaimed gay romance miniseries Fellow Travelers (2023), playing a closeted gay man in 1950s Washington whose decades-long love affair with a reckless fellow traveler unfolds against the backdrop of McCarthyism. He played Fiyero in the blockbuster Wicked (2024). As one of the most visible gay men in mainstream entertainment, Bailey has become a significant figure in the ongoing conversation about queer representation and leading-man status.