Video: Jonathan Bailey Recalls Juggling WICKED, BRIDGERTON, and FELLOW TRAVELERS All at Once

As part of Variety's "Actors on Actors" series, Naomi Watts and Jonathan Bailey sat down to discuss some of their latest projects. 

One such project is the highly anticipated screen adaptation of Broadway's Wicked, where Bailey will be playing the role of Fiyero. During the interview, he recalled working on Bridgerton and Fellow Travelers at the same time he was rehearsing for the major movie musical.

"There's some residual trauma there," the actor joked. Watts pointed out the challenges of doing simultaneous work on such vastly different projects. 

"There were moments when it sort of meshed together in kind of a kooky way...there are videos I have rediscovered of this time," he said, remembering practicing the choreography for Wicked on his lunch break for Fellow Travelers. 

"I think there were 33 days where I was working in a row and I went back and forth from Canada to London three times within that."

Bailey also revealed that he wears contact lenses for Fiyero in Wicked, which he said was a challenge "especially if you know that [using your eyes to act] is something that you can rely on in terms of how to communicate with what's going on with the character."

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Now well known for his roles on screen, Bailey has performing on stage since a young child, playing Tiny Tim in a Royal Shakespeare Company's production of A Christmas Carol and then Gavroche in Les Miserables at the Palace Theatre in London. He has since starred in contemporary plays such as South Downs in 2012, The York Realist in 2018, and Cock in 2022; in classical plays like the Royal National Theatre's Othello in 2013 and Chichester Festival Theatre's King Lear in 2017; as well as in musicals, namely the London revival of The Last Five Years in 2016.

More recently, he starred in the 2018 gender-bent production of Stephen Sondheim's Company as Jamie for which he won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in a Musical in 2019.

On screen, Bailey is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Anthony, Viscount Bridgerton, in the Regency romance series Bridgerton. Bailey has since starred in the romantic drama miniseries Fellow Travelers, for which he won a Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor.