Jonathan Bailey: Clear words about his private life

Whether as the attractive Viscount Anthony in the Netflix hit “Bridgerton” or the charismatic Prince Fiyero in the musical adaptation “Wicked”: Jonathan Bailey (36) has conquered the hearts of female and male audiences alike in recent years with his dazzling charm. But what about the acting star’s private life? In an interview, the 36-year-old found clear words.

He doesn’t want to talk about his relationship status. The actor, however, speaks openly about his identity as a queer man and admits: “I think other people understood my sexuality before I was even aware of it.”

Understanding and fully accepting his belonging to the LGBTQIA+ community was a gradual realization; he came out in his early twenties. A woman he was with at the time also helped him.

“It’s interesting how binary you are. You’re perceived as either one or the other,” Bailey says. “That’s how I saw it at the time, but there are so many nuances. My experience with that relationship back then wasn’t that I was in secret.” His ex-girlfriend is “still one of my best friends.”

However, when you were a teenager, dealing with your identity wasn’t always easy. For example, Bailey tells of a sleepover party with school friends where he excitedly asked the group: “Guys, who here thinks they’re gay? Anyone? I do. I do.” It was a conversation that he really wanted to have “to see if everyone else saw it that way too.” “But everyone was quiet,” the 36-year-old remembers today. A teacher once exposed him in front of the whole class with a homophobic term.

It is probably because of these experiences that Jonathan Bailey is now committed to the LGBTQIA+ community: the actor is the patron of the charity Just Like Us, which supports queer students. At the beginning of the year, he even founded his own foundation, the Shameless Fund, which aims to protect queer people from oppression.