ProfileBridgerton actor Jonathan Bailey on swapping swagger for softness in LGBTQ melodrama Fellow Travelers
- In productions such as Bridgerton, Jonathan Bailey plays confident, charismatic characters. The English actor’s new role is a far cry from those
- He talks about feeling ‘vulnerable’ playing the submissive partner in a gay relationship, how it has changed his life, and why identity is a source of strength
Jonathan Bailey understands the uses of the charm offensive.
As Sam, the handsome Lothario of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s delightful pre-Fleabag curio, Crashing; Anthony, the romantic hero of Bridgerton’s second season; and John, the jerk of a protagonist in Mike Bartlett’s love-triangle play Cock, the English actor, 36, has swaggered up to the precipice of superstardom.
With roles in such Hollywood studio tentpoles as Wicked and Jurassic World on the horizon, he may just break through.
Yet he delivers career-best work in US TV network Showtime’s queer melodrama Fellow Travelers, as Tim Laughlin, an anti-communist crusader turned gay-rights activist, by leaving behind the self-assured rakes and tapping a new wellspring: soft power.
Tim may be, as Bailey puts it, “an open nerve”, but as it turns out, the devout Catholic and political naif – who falls for suave US State Department operative Hawkins “Hawk” Fuller (Matt Bomer) just as US Senator Joseph McCarthy tries to purge the federal government of LGBTQ people – is formidable.
Stretching from the Lavender Scare – a moral panic in mid-20th century America about homosexual people in the government which led to their mass dismissal from government service – to the depths of the Aids crisis, in scenes of tenderness, cruelty and toe-curling sex, Bailey’s performance communicates that little-spoken truth of relationships: it takes more strength to submit than it does to control.