UNTAMED TODAY  ·  COVER STORY  ·  CULTURE & IDENTITY

By UNTAMED TODAY Editorial

Rose-tinted. Hexagonal. A British actor wore them to a Jurassic World press tour, and the internet christened them his slutty little glasses inside a single afternoon. The frame had every quality of a one-week meme.

He took the joke seriously.

He partnered with Cubitts, a London eyewear house. He named the frame Loomis, after his character. He routed the proceeds into an LGBTQ charity he had just founded, The Shameless Fund, where fifty percent of every pair sold goes directly to grassroots queer organisations working with the populations the rest of the sector has agreed, quietly, not to see.

The joke became infrastructure. The meme became money. The rose-tinted glasses became a funding mechanism for queer elders most of the culture has forgotten.

That is the signature of Jonathan Bailey. Not the virality. The turn after it.

The many entry points

Depending on which year you started watching, you know a different man entirely.

Anthony Bridgerton, the eldest son, the duty-bound viscount, the face of the Regency juggernaut he returned to before the hiatus began. Tim Laughlin in Fellow Travelers, the devout congressional staffer whose Emmy-nominated performance rendered the McCarthy-era Lavender Scare with something close to ache. Fiyero in Wicked in 2024 and Wicked: For Good in 2025, sabre-dancing through one of the highest-grossing musicals in modern history. Dr. Henry Loomis in Jurassic World Rebirth, a film that grossed more than 869 million dollars worldwide and, paired with the Wicked sequel, made him the highest-grossing actor of 2025.

In November of that same year, People named him Sexiest Man Alive, the first openly gay man to hold the title in its four decades.

None of these entry points are wrong. None are complete.

The tensions he will not surrender

What feels like sudden ubiquity is not a beginning. It is the result of a very long preparation finally being seen. Mastery did not rush. The spotlight caught up.

Because the thing about Bailey, and it is the specific fact that makes him an UNTAMED TODAY subject rather than simply an attractive British export, is that he has spent more than a decade refusing to let any single industry own the story of him.

He is a Laurence Olivier Award winner, Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical, for the gender-swapped 2019 revival of Company. He is a Royal Shakespeare Company child who played Gavroche on the West End at eight. In 2025 he closed a run as the title role in Richard II at the Bridge Theatre. One hundred and three performances. Not a single one missed. A physical discipline that reads less like actor behaviour and more like priesthood.

He has been nominated for a Primetime Emmy. He has been listed in the Time 100 Next as one of the most influential rising figures in global culture. He has appeared on the Sexiest Man Alive cover. And in the same breath, he is a trained Shakespearean who can tell you, specifically, what Sandy Dennis did with Honey in Mike Nichols's 1966 film of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and why every working actor should study it.

Powerful and tender. Blockbuster and repertory. Sexiest Man Alive and Shakespearean. None of these dimensions cancel each other out. They compound. Which is the whole brand of the person himself, that the fully expressed life is not a series of trade-offs between ambition and soul, between box office and body of work, between sensuality and seriousness. It is a practice of holding all of it at once without losing the specific texture of any part.

What the audience cannot resist

There is a moment, quiet, specific, irreversible, that lives inside every Jonathan Bailey performance.

The scene does not announce it. No swell of music signals its arrival. The camera does not underline it. He simply makes a choice, small, exact, completely human, and the distance between actor and audience dissolves. The room does not get louder. It gets quieter. And in that quiet, the viewer stops watching a performance and starts feeling a truth.

This is not charisma in the conventional sense. Charisma projects. It performs. It asks to be received. Bailey does the opposite. He removes the demonstration until what remains is simply a man inside a moment, fully present in it. And presence, real presence, is the one thing an audience cannot resist.

Watch him in stillness. Not passive stillness. Decisive stillness. The kind that says he is not there to convince you, he is there to be. That is not absence of energy. It is concentration of it. Most actors pursue presence and build toward it. Bailey calibrates it, reading the room, the rhythm, the emotional temperature between bodies in a scene, and adjusting in real time with a sensitivity most never reach.

Which is the other observation about his work, and the one that takes the longest to put words to. He does not perform desire. He permits it. To perform desire is to show it, to make sure the audience understands. To permit it is to let it exist without managing it, without softening it, without packaging it for comfort. That requires fearlessness without spectacle. And when an audience encounters that, real, uncontained feeling, they do not analyse it. They respond.

Thirty-two days, three centuries

Between 2022 and 2023, Bailey did something that should not have been possible. He filmed three productions at overlapping times, Bridgerton season three, Fellow Travelers, and Wicked, and once, famously, logged thirty-two consecutive days of work, flying back and forth between sets four times in the process.

He described the whirlpool of it to The Hollywood Reporter in 2024: going straight from a 1960s cabin set to the airport, sleeping on the plane, arriving at a Regency ball, sleeping there, then heading to Wicked to learn choreography.

The observation to make about that is not the workload. It is the tenses. One man, moving between 1960s American political paranoia, 1810s English aristocracy, and a fantasy musical about identity, in the space of a single sleep cycle, and keeping each character intact and separate.

Most actors cannot do that. Most working actors know they cannot, and will tell you as much. Bailey did it, then quietly told the press that music was how he kept the characters sorted, each role with its own internal soundtrack, and that he would probably not choose to do it again.

Which is the other thing about him. The work is public. The method is private. The credit goes to producers, to family, to the patience of the people who absorbed the cost of the schedule, the way it always does with people who understand that humility is not a posture but a better strategy.

The body that tells the truth

If there is a single performance that explains why Jonathan Bailey belongs in this magazine rather than any other, it is Tim Laughlin in Fellow Travelers.

The Showtime miniseries, which ran in 2023, tracked a clandestine love affair between a career State Department official and a young Catholic congressional staffer, across three decades, from the McCarthy-era Lavender Scare in the 1950s to the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Bailey played Tim. The idealist. The believer. The one who kept choosing love inside a political climate that had made loving a prosecutable offence.

Opposite him, Matt Bomer played Hawkins Fuller, controlled, devastatingly composed, armoured in the kind of elegance that only years of private pain can construct. The pairing was rare. Not because it was good. Because it was exact. Two instruments tuned to the same uncommon frequency, each sharpening the other. Separately, both performances are extraordinary. Together they make something the screen rarely offers, a love story that does not flinch, does not soften its own tragedy, and does not apologise for the cost.

The performance earned Bailey a Critics' Choice Television Award and a Primetime Emmy nomination. It also did something more specific. It gave an openly gay British actor, playing a closeted American Catholic in 1950s Washington, the rare kind of role that collapses the distance between performance and testimony. He was not playing a man who looked like him. He was playing the historical condition that men like him survived.

And here is where the culture has been late to understand. Being openly gay does not narrow his reach. It deepens it. Because queerness, lived and embodied and navigated, develops a specific perceptual capacity, an awareness of the gap between what is said and what is felt. Foreground, the scene. Background, the truth underneath it. Bailey carries both at once. That is why his performances feel layered. The audience is not only watching what is happening. They are feeling what cannot be said. And when that meets material strong enough to hold it, as it does opposite Bomer, the result is not representation. It is resonance.

He has spoken about Sandy Dennis's Oscar-winning turn as Honey in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf as the work that opened him to what acting could be. She is so fluid, he told Backstage, and admitted it might be the most exposing thing he could say about his own inner world. The fluency he watched in her, the refusal to fix a person into a shape, is what he has spent twenty years putting into his own work.

He told Time in 2025 that he was activated to build The Shameless Fund after Fellow Travelers. It was not a pivot. It was a through-line. The series is the reason the charity exists. The performance is the reason the activism became institutional. This is the AND tension in its purest form. The body that performed Tim Laughlin is the same body that founded the Fund. The gay Catholic in 1957 and the British actor in 2026 are the same continuous argument, made across different uniforms, about who gets to live freely and who is required to disappear for the comfort of a better-funded majority.

The choice most actors do not make

Which brings us to the decision. The one most actors at his trajectory do not make, and which Bailey announced, characteristically, without ceremony, to British GQ in September 2025. He is stepping back. Not disappearing, he returned for Bridgerton season four on Netflix before the hiatus began, but declining a slate of film offers in order to build something else.

The something else is The Shameless Fund, the LGBTQ charity he founded in June 2024. Its motivating statistic, which he has repeated in interview after interview with the precision of a man who memorised it, is this: for every hundred pounds raised in the UK, only one penny reaches LGBTQ causes.

The Fund's answer is a mechanism. Partner with global brands, Loewe, Cubitts, the cast of Wicked, to convert cultural capital into actual capital, routed specifically toward the populations inside the queer community that the philanthropic sector most reliably forgets: elders, refugees, trans and non-binary adults, asylum seekers. Its first project, a Drink Your Milk shirt with Loewe, took a tender, defiant moment from Fellow Travelers and turned it into a fundraising garment. A later partnership with a Yorkshire organisation called Out Together funds local hubs designed to reduce isolation among older LGBTQ people, the demographic most visibly absent from queer cultural narratives.

He told GQ he had been working solidly for about three years, and that with everything happening in the world, he was going to stop acting for a bit the following year and focus on the Shameless Fund. What is worth noticing is the economy of it. No manifesto. No self-congratulation. No language about purpose, journey, or healing. A statement of fact, followed by a direction. The voice of a person who has already decided.

Acting is still the craft. Activism is now the axis. The two are not in competition. They are in conversation.

The refusal that matters

We live in a cultural moment that rewards the single dimension. The one thing, branded, optimised, legible. A visibility of a specific kind, flat, immediate, easy to summarise in a sentence. And it is producing, as a result, a generation of public figures who have agreed, often without knowing they have agreed, to be reduced.

Jonathan Bailey has not agreed.

He is the bachelor viscount with the Olivier Award. The Jurassic World lead with the LGBTQ non-profit. The Wicked star still doing Shakespeare on a West End stage nobody had to talk him into. The openly gay British actor who has declined to make his sexuality into either a marketing hook or a private apology, and has instead turned it into the organising principle of philanthropic work aimed at people whose funding nobody else wants to provide.

He is not uncomplicated. He is not easily summarised. He is not built for a pitch deck. Which is precisely why, at the cultural moment where everything is being pitched, he matters.

The numbers are not the story. More than 869 million dollars at the box office. An Emmy nomination. A Laurence Olivier. A Critics' Choice. A Time 100 Next listing. A Sexiest Man Alive cover. These are facts, not narrative. The story is the ongoing refusal to become smaller than what he already is.

You can almost see him deciding, in interview after interview, that he will not flatten. He will not separate the Shakespeare from the blockbuster. He will not separate the fame from the philanthropy. He will not separate the rose-tinted absurdity of the Cubitts glasses from the serious queer elders the sales of those glasses now fund.

And you understand, watching him do it, that this is what refusing to be reduced actually looks like. Not a rebellion. Not a posture. A discipline. The quiet, patient, Olivier-winning, hundred-and-three-performance, thirty-two-day, Time-100-listed, Shameless-Fund-founding discipline of insisting on the full picture, and building the infrastructure required to keep it in place.

Most people will not do this work. Most people will not refuse the edits. Which is why, when someone does, and does it this visibly, this precisely, this unapologetically, the only responsible thing UNTAMED TODAY can do is document it.

Jonathan Bailey is not taking a break. He is making a choice. And the choice is not to shrink.

GOT SOMETHING INSIDE YOU?

A story. A book. A song. A painting. A season of life you finally made it through. A business built from the wreckage. A truth you have been carrying long enough that it is ready to become something. UNTAMED TODAY was built for exactly that, for the voices that do not fit anywhere else and do not apologise for it.

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