Bridgerton's Jonathan Bailey Puts His Omega Seamaster to the Test

What’s important to Jonathan Bailey? Punctuality. “I'm far too worried about letting people down to be late,” he explains, sitting opposite me in a suite in Heckfield Place, a grand estate in the Hampshire countryside. “Working on set and especially being an actor, sometimes you're not told if you’re late; people are too scared to. So I'm hyper, hyper vigilant. The older I get the more it feels like so much time has been wasted worrying about being late.”

The 35-year-old actor has travelled here – in good time, naturally – to host a dinner celebrating the Omega Seamaster’s 75th anniversary, his first bit of ambassadorial duty since taking on the role in April. Dining in a Georgian manor down the road from Jane Austen’s house, it's easy to make comparisons to the lodgings of one of Bailey’s most famous fictional roles: English nobleman Anthony Bridgerton (from the Netflix show Bridgerton, if you’re not part of the 82 million households that watched season one). One of his character's most prized possessions is his father's pocket watch, and Bailey shares that familial relationship with timepieces, too.

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“My dad had an Omega growing up,” he says, then explaining how his “Nana” wore her mother’s watch. “From a younger perspective, I remember thinking that they were a signifier of adulthood and sophistication.” But now, the Oxfordshire-born actor uses them to help tap into different roles. “I know people talk about music that gets them into character, or fragrances or jewellery, but for me, I've played many characters who've had specific watches. When you're trying to build a character, you realise the significance of that.”

While many have come to know Bailey as the lead in the show’s second season – it’s Netflix’s most popular English-language TV series, accruing 627.11 million hours of watch time in four weeks, bumping season one to second place – Bailey's career started in childhood.

He played Gavroche in the West End production of Les Misérables at nine years old, and moved into TV in his twenties with detective drama Broadchurch, Michaela Cole’s Chewing Gum and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Crashing. But it was his roles on stage – an Olivier Award-winning performance in Company as well as Mike Bartlett’s Cock, to name a few – that helped him grow as an actor.

“I think you have to go back to stage to learn your craft, because you have to do it every single day,” he explains. “You learn how to tell stories in different ways, and then you take that craft and you put it on screen. But I do think that I feel more alive and connected to life having been on stage.”

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This autumn, he’s returning to the TV in another love-infused period drama. Adapted from Thomas Mallon’s 2007 novel, his next project, Fellow Travelers, follows a romance between war hero Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer) and religious idealist Tim Laughlin (played by Bailey) from the early-Fifties Lavender Scare – a US policy that saw gay and lesbian government employees fired due to a moral panic about homosexuality – to the ‘80s AIDS crisis.

But despite a seeming predisposition for stories from a bygone year, Bailey is more interested in the universality of people's characters: “The nerd in me is obsessed with the idea of the consistency of humanity, and how people fundamentally stay the same even with the evolution of the world around them.”

Clearly, Bailey is a watch guy. But is he a dress-watch-with-a-bow-tie guy? A retro digital watch guy? Or, dare I say, a timepiece and step-counter in one, guy? It turns out he’s the type who’ll put a diving watch through its paces.

“There's something so peaceful about being submerged underwater,” he says of scuba diving, one of the many outdoor activities Bailey will do with a watch on his wrist. “And if you've got an underwater watch, like a Seamaster, all you can hear is the echo of its tick.”

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