Madison Bailey Rises Up

The 24-year-old Outer Banks star is evolving into her highest form in real time, in front of an audience of millions.

- By Tre'Vell Anderson. Photographs by Josefina Santos

One thing is abundantly clear after spending a few hours with Madison Bailey: She isn't interested in wearing a mask that grins and lies, as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar once wrote. She'd much prefer to show the truth of her reality and to live in a world where that's the norm. "If everyone were just 10 percent more honest, we would see a lot of shit changing," she says over lunch at a French bistro just outside Los Angeles.

"I want to be respected. I want people to think I'm glamorous. I want people to see pictures of me and be like, 'She's stunning," she continues. "But I also want people to know that I don't look like that every day. I'm not perfect, and I'm trying to show y'all I'm not."

It's a refreshing departure from the going-rate expectation that the people on our television screens be different (read: better) than us. But it's also Madison's rare kind of Hollywood magic: People feel like they really know her because she's not interested in publicly being anything but herself.

For fans of the North Carolina native, this won't come as such a surprise. From her earliest roles in 2015 (on Constantine and Swamp Murders) to her multi-episode arc on The CW's Black Lightning to now three seasons of the wildly successful Netflix adventure drama Outer Banks, she's been as open a book as possible. About being a mixed-race Black daughter of white adoptive parents. About living with borderline personality disorder. About being pansexual and in a loving relationship with her girlfriend of three years, former UNC Charlotte basketball player Mariah Linney. (At one point during our chat, Madison shows me a video just sent to her by a friend who's on a snowboarding trip with Mariah. "Here goes my girl. She looks like she's having a blast....Yeah, get some energy out because I can't hear about snowboarding again," she jokes.)