From Bridgerton to Wicked to Jurassic Park, Jonathan Bailey has stayed booked and busy.
“I’ve been working solidly for about three years now, which has been amazing and mind-blowing,” Bailey, 37, told British GQ in an interview published on Wednesday, September 3. “With everything happening in the world right now, I’m going to stop acting for a bit next year and just focus on the Shameless Fund.”
Bailey launched the Shameless Fund foundation in 2024, with the intention of supporting the LGBTQIA+ community. (Bailey himself is openly queer.)
“Around the world, anti-LGBTQ+ laws are on the increase,” a website description reads. “We’re raising cash through global brand collaborations to power up international, national and grassroots nonprofits to forge a world where every LGBTQ+ person can live authentically, love freely and thrive without the burdens of discrimination, oppression or shame.”
According to Bailey, he wants to be even more hands-on in running the nonprofit.
“Over the next few months, I’ll be focusing on staffing and making sure we get all the right people in all the right places,” Bailey told GQ, going on to highlight the Shameless Fund’s mission. “There’s this statistic: out of every £100 raised in the UK, only 1 [pence] goes to the LGBTQ+ community. You really have to dig to find solutions, and I genuinely think The Shameless Fund is exactly that.”
The actor further gushed that the organizations’ collaborations are equal parts fun, creative and can “make a real difference.”
As for Bailey, he previously revealed that he first came to terms with sexuality after attending a London Pride event in 2006.
Even after finding fame on Bridgerton, Jonathan Bailey still finds himself facing blatant homophobia, such as when a random man threatened to kill him. In an interview with U.K. outlet The Standard published on Tuesday, December 12, the Fellow Travelers star, 35, said the incident occurred in October while he was in Washington, D.C., for […]
“I was doing a play, I took over from Andrew Garfield in Beautiful Thing, and I was in rehearsals, and they took me to Pride to understand the community. And I remember that moment. But it wasn’t my time,” Bailey recalled to Attitude magazine in 2020. “The most conservative conversations I’ve had about me being honest about my sexuality in this day and age have come from gay men in the industry, ‘Oh, no, you can’t come out. You shouldn’t really do that.’”
He continued, “This was at a stage where perhaps I was coming to terms with my own sexuality, I hadn’t necessarily hidden it. But I’ve never been not honest about it. It’s just there had never been a need to talk about it. There’s a sense of shame, I think, that’s palpable throughout gay men within the industry. But then there’s also this heteronormative, heterosexual understanding of sexuality.”
Bailey has since been in a relationship with a man he referred to as “lovely” in a 2023 interview with London’s Evening Standard, and often opts to keep their life to themselves.
“Having a private life is, for me, completely critical,” Bailey added at the time. “I don’t know if I would be able to be as confident to speak out on other things if I felt that my whole life was up for grabs.”
