Story by Ian Thorley
Jonathan Bailey has enjoyed spectacular success over the last couple of years. I first met him two years ago in a country hotel on the edge of the Wentworth Estate in Surrey, on the occasion of him being announced as an OMEGA ambassador.
He’d just starred as Lord Anthony Bridgerton in the second series of the Netflix smash Bridgerton and was being lauded as the UK’s next big international star. Today, Bailey is on the cusp of Hollywood superstardom: he’s just featured in the blockbuster musical Wicked – a film that received ten Oscar nominations earlier this year and saw him cast alongside Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo – and will appear this summer in the latest iteration of the Jurassic Park film series, Jurassic World Rebirth. He now effortlessly moves in celebrity circles: “I was chatting today with Ari,” he says, adding that they converse in a WhatsApp group. “They’ve got a little mini group with just Ari and Cynthia, and there’s a dinosaur group as well.”
We meet during a celebratory dinner on a cold and dark January evening at The Twenty Two, a glitzy Mayfair hotel and restaurant, to toast his ongoing relationship with OMEGA. Bailey greets me with a warm handshake: he’s relaxed and friendly as we sit down to discuss Winkie Princes, dinosaurs and Shakespeare. “Now that you’re a huge star,” I tease him. “Thank you for shaking my hand.”
Bailey had come straight from rehearsals for Richard II, and had grown a full beard in order to play the titular role – a departure from his usual clean-cut image. Written around 1595, the play was one of Shakespeare’s earliest, but is rarely performed these days. It tells the story of an arrogant and self-indulgent king, who single handedly faces down an army of rebels but whose reign is also marred by tragedy, ineptitude and weakness, leading to his deposal by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke (who goes on to become King Henry IV). Bailey describes it as, “a real full-circle moment. I’ve been acting for 30 years. I worked at the Royal Shakespeare Company before I was 13.”
In the big screen adaptation of Wicked, Bailey plays another twinkly-eyed rogue royal, Prince Fiyero, a character who hails from the Winkie provinces of Oz and is, initially, equally arrogant and lackadaisical. Indeed, the prince’s most famous phrase turns out to be: ‘Excuse me, there’s no pretence here: I happen to be genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow’. Unlike Richard II, however, Fiyero undergoes an profound evolution during the course of the narrative and, by the second part of the film (in cinemas this November), is shown to be a loyal, courageous and forthright man – one who, legend has it, is also transformed into the scarecrow that eventually meets Dorothy (played by Judy Garland) in the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz.
“[When] I think about The Wizard of Oz… I remember four generations of family loving this film. And that’s something to be cherished, isn’t it?”
Jonathan Bailey
Another full circle moment for Bailey, then, as the original movie, and particularly its scarecrow, had a profound experience on Bailey as a child – the actor cites them as powerful influences for wanting to enter the world of the theatre. “I can’t think of a film that I remember being so inspired by,” he tells me. “It’s the sort of American fairy tale of it. The technicolour of the film and Ray Bolger as the Scarecrow, the big vibrant performances in these films [were] just so exciting to watch as a kid. And it was obviously incredibly scary.”
“[When] I think about The Wizard of Oz, and also Wicked, I remember the family moments of four generations of family loving this film. And that’s something to be cherished, isn’t it? I think The Wizard of Oz definitely was one of those for me.”
In addition to his stage and film credits, Bailey’s high cheekbones and natty dress sense have made him a darling of the fashion world. In addition to being a ‘face’ of Omega, he has also modelled for Giorgio Armani, the Chanel-owned swimwear firm Orlebar Brown, and has been shot for untold numbers of glossy magazines including Vogue, GQ and Attitude. Not to mention the fact that he’s friends with Jonathan Anderson, the former Loewe designer who’s now the most lauded man in fashion following his appointment as the creative director at Dior. In accordance to tonight’s strict dress code which proposes ‘black with a hint of gold’, Bailey’s impeccably dressed in a midnight-hued Burberry smoking jacket and trousers, an open necked dark grey shirt, Jimmy Choo shoes and a gold lapel brooch worn with a stunning Moonshine Gold Omega Seamaster Aqua Terra 38mm. He tells me his day-to-day watch is a De Ville, “which I’m very emotionally attached to.”
The day before we meet, Wicked received an incredible ten Oscar nominations and I’m dying to know how he thinks this will change him. “It just feels even more and more surreal and abstract… I’m so proud to be a part of it,” he says, adding that “it’s so deserved” for the film as a whole, complimenting the success of Grande and Erivo in particular. “I’m not surprised at all [at the nominations]. I just was blown away by their performances and you know, both of their performances just sort of get better every time”.
Bailey was brought up in the Oxfordshire countryside, in a village called Benson, a world away from the bright lights of London and LA. He describes his family as “not theatre people”. He didn’t attend theatre school but instead started work as an actor at age 13. His first role was in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, for which he was hand-picked for the part of Tiny Tim. He later took on the role of Gavroche in Les Misérables, followed by the young Prince Arthur in Shakespeare’s King John.
He’s also played various supporting roles in TV shows including the hit crime drama Broadchurch, which starred Olivia Colman and David Tennant, until his big break in the second season of Bridgerton. The show is based on a series of eight Regency-inspired romance books by The New York Times writer, Julia Quinn.
The first series, which aired during lockdown, was a huge if not surprise runaway success and was watched by some 82 million people worldwide in its first month: it became Netflix’s biggest-ever series, surpassed only by the Korean drama Squid Game. Following this, he starred in a miniseries of the Thomas Mallon novel, Fellow Travelers on Paramount.
“As an actor, you should be able to play any role within the structure of fairness and kindness”
Jonathan Bailey
Although he came out as gay in his twenties, Bailey has neither been restricted nor typecast by the roles that he’s played, jumping effortlessly between his Bridgerton character as a womanising cad, to a gay man caught up in the structures of 1950s America to a dancing Prince Fiyero and an anguished King Richard. He explains this type of success succinctly: “You should [as an actor] be able to play any role within the structure of fairness and kindness.”
This summer he stars as Henry Loomis, a palaeontologist, in Jurassic World Rebirth alongside Scarlett Johansson and Rupert Friend. The story follows Zora Bennett (Johansson) as she leads a team of scientists and mercenaries to the most dangerous place on earth, the long-abandoned island research facility for the original Jurassic Park. Their mission is to secure genetic material from dinosaurs whose DNA can apparently save mankind. Upon arrival, they make a shocking discovery that’s been hidden from the world for decades and endangers all their lives.
Effortlessly moving between stage, film, TV and musicals, Bailey appears to favour no particular craft, but tells me: “I’ve got a real love of theatre and it’s a real sort of addicting silence when you’re just about to go on stage. And being in the room with people at that moment, in the rehearsal room watching everyone come up with their performances. You see the process of how it all comes together much more in the rehearsal room. In film, it’s different because actors, their function in a film is only sort of 10 per cent of the whole undertaking… they’re really hard to sort of compare, but I’m relishing both.”
The tie that binds all his many characters together, Bailey reveals, is time. “Anthony Bridgerton is obsessed with time, he cherishes the stopwatch that was from his father. He’s so worried about his mortality. Prince Fiyero literally dances on books in the beautiful craft of watches and clocks celebrating Wicked all the way through the film, and never more so than in his dance number. And then Richard II is obsessed with time as well, the cyclical nature of monarchy and his legacy. In his final soliloquy, where he finally dismantles a sense of self-absorption and narcissism is when he realises that ‘I wasted time and now doth time waste me.’
“With Jurassic,” he continues, “I knew I was playing a palaeontologist called Henry Loomis and I knew that he’d probably need an heirloom watch. So I texted Raynald [Aeschlimann, CEO of Omega] that I’d spied the 1959 Railmaster: he managed to track one down and get one [for me]. I wore that all the way through the film.”
After dinosaurs what does he see as his next role? James Bond is up for grabs I suggest. “I can’t see myself as anyone. I mean, they’re big shoes to fill, aren’t they?” Yes, but they change the role every time, I remind him. “That’s true. Well, who knows? For now, it’s Winkie Prince!”
Like this? Read about the James Bond rumours swirling around fellow Omega ambassador, Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
