English actor Jonathan Bailey was BOTD in 1988. Born in Wallingford, Oxfordshire to a middle-class family, he studied ballet as a child. At seven, he was cast in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s productions of A Christmas Carol and Les Enfants du Paradis. The following year, he joined the cast of Les Miserables in London’s West End and appeared in TV period drama Bramwell. He made his big screen debut in the 2004 fantasy film Five Children and It, and started as a gay teenager in the 2006 London revival of Jonathan Harvey’s play Beautiful Thing. Opting not to go to university or drama school, he appeared in the 2009 sitcom Off the Hook, and played a desexualised Leonardo da Vinci in a children’s TV series. He rose to public attention in the hit 2013 crime series Broadchurch, leading to roles in Shakespeare’s Othello and King Lear (the latter opposite Ian McKellen) and a musical version of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho. He also appeared in cult TV comedies Crashing with writer/director Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Chewing Gum with Michaela Cole. In 2018, he co-starred in a gender-swapped revival of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Company, playing a reluctant bridegroom (a role originally written for a woman), winning an Olivier Award for his performance. His career went global in 2020 after playing a frequently naked aristocrat in the revisionist period drama Bridgerton, anointing him as a Gen-Z sex symbol. He co-starred with Matt Bomer in the 2023 TV drama Fellow Travelers, based on Thomas Mallon’s novel about gay men navigating a relationship during McCarthy-era America, earning him an Emmy nomination. In 2024, he appeared in the film musical Wicked, co-starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, earning a Screen Actors Guild nomination. Discreetly gay for much of his early career, Bailey came out publicly in 2018. He lives in Hove, East Sussex and is currently in a relationship.