Bridgerton's Jonathan Bailey Is Giving Us the Vapours

For English actor Jonathan Bailey, becoming a leading man seemed like a long shot. Until he fell into the role of a lifetime as a charming womanizer on a little show called Bridgerton.

- Douglas Greenwood

Jonathan Bailey felt lost and didn’t know what to do with himself. It was March 2020, and for nearly a year, the British actor had been immersed on the set of Bridgerton, Netflix’s horny and ornate period drama set in a fictional and fantastical 19thcentury London. The show’s debut was months away, but working on it was consuming just about every conscious moment of Bailey’s life; his usually modern, slicked-back hair had been permed into the style of his character, Lord Anthony Bridgerton, a lothario of landed gentry, with two sharp mutton chops stroked against his cheek. It was like being a part of some social experiment, he thought. A wonderful abduction in which he’d be lifted from his normal life and sent tumbling like a stray astronaut into space, crashing into a new planet.

Here, on Planet Bridgerton, gracious ringlet-haired women danced in ball gowns to string quartet covers of Billie Eilish, charming potential suitors who were flirting and sleeping their way through the city, while an anonymous columnist would chronicle everybody’s secrets and stir up drama for London’s aristocracy. Until Bridgerton, Bailey’s own modest fame had stemmed from nearly three decades in British theatre and television: popular prime time detective drama Broadchurch, shows from prestige talents like Michaela Coel’s Chewing Gum and Phoebe WallerBridge’s Crashing, as well as prolific spells on London’s West End stages, most notably in a gender-swapped reimagining of Stephen Sondheim’s classic