imagine that you've just watched a show about women. lots of them. all the mcs and majority of the side characters are women. it's just wall to wall women. you go into the tag of the show. what's the top post?
unnamed fictional man with approximately 7 seconds of screentime
photoshoot of the actor who plays the unnamed man
unnamed fictional man x reader
the actor who plays the unnamed fictional man x reader
somehow a different show with the actor who plays the unnamed fictional man
Doctor Who episodes | Story: 147 | season 24
↳ Dragonfire
“Think about me when you’re living your life one day after another, all in a neat pattern. Think about the homeless traveller and his old police box, with his days like crazy paving.”
Those of you who notice such things will know that in a little less than two weeks, it's going to be a year since @petermorwood departed this plane of existence.
As the date's been getting closer, I'm becoming increasingly clear (due to mood swings and sleep disturbances and other such stuff) that it would be a really good thing for me if I don't have to live through this first anniversary of his loss anywhere near the house where he breathed his last.
For that day, and ideally a couple/few days on either side of it, I really need to get away from here.
So that's my plan, if I can get all this to come together (with everybody's help). ...It's not like any brief escape will get the pain to stop, you know? That's years away... if ever. But at least this move will prevent a short-term crisis, and allow me (after the really painful day has passed) to start getting back to what around here now passes for "standard operating procedure"—meaning writing, and doing other work, and getting on with the rest of the current form of life—as quickly as possible.
What I have in mind is to spend the days on either side of May 9th—and the day itself—as far away from the cottage as physical issues will allow me to travel. Let's think of it as a long weekend, an hour or two's flight away. To manage that, though, I need to boost sales at the Ebooks Direct store over the days to come. If the necessary funds manifest themselves over the course of this week, I'll have time to make the necessary arrangements.
So can I get those of you who see this post to reblog it, and bring the Ebooks Direct store to people's notice as widely as possible? ...As numerous ebook bundles are available at discount prices. (There are more than show in the slide below: that's just a snapshot of how the front-page carousel looks.)
...And if none of these appeal (or if you've got them already and want to give them to somebody else): hey, there are gift cards! (I finally managed to get these things organized correctly...) 😅 They come in per-bundle versions, or in a number of cash values to suit your preference.
Finally: if you've already got too many ebooks, or otherwise just prefer to drop a little something into the kitty to help me escape for a few-ish days, here's my Ko-Fi.
Support Diane Duane
...So let's see if this can be pulled off. And for all your past help, and assistance to come: thanks, friends. I appreciate you so much... as your voices, heard daily, are pretty much all that makes the local silence bearable.
Yep, 2002-ish but as i was thinking about it I'm not 100% sure it was fanfiction.net it actually may have been Geocities, I do remember it was Yu Yu Hakusho fanfic
On a whim, I put on "The Residence" while I ate dinner tonight. It's a murder mystery taking place in the whitehouse. The MC is a detective named Cordelia Cupp:
And I am in LOVE with her first of all, she spends half the show looking for/at birds or thinking about birdwatching (I LOVE HER), while solving the crime.
She is followed around by Park
Who is assigned to her to help her (he is not very helpful)
And actually assisted by the head Usher
I thought the victim would be the president, but it's not- the president and his husband are also characters, along with the australian prime minister and his foreign minister, because this is all taking place during a State Dinner with the australian government in attendance as the guests of honor. I don't want to spoil anything else, but I think Tumblr would really appreciate the chef even though I CANNOT find a good enough image of her to encapsulate her raw energy.
Anyway, I have excellent taste and so far this show has been a DELIGHT so if you have some time, go watch!
I didn't even recognise her as Tilly! It's an amazing performance.
Also the show is not exactly star studded (Kylie Minogue excepted) but it's definitely "oh my god it's them" studded. It has Giancarlo Esposito! The number of times I had to pause and search IMDB, or just went "oh! That person!"
It's got CJ from B99! It's got Lane from Gilmore Girls! (It's so nice to see her working, it's been a while since I saw her and she's great.) It's got Jerry from Superstore!
The central performance (Uzo Aduba as Detective Cordelia Cupp) is *amazing*. There are so many other outstanding performances. The writing, the direction, the scoring.
For my money an almost 100% perfect piece of television.
As a transmasc person, I cannot tell you how important Charlie Covell's interpretation of Caeneus is to me. When he was first introduced as "the second person" in the prophecy--- I legit started crying. Because WHEN has there ever been a trans man as a main character in a genre series EVER?! Its a small thing, but to go out of your way to not only have a trans character, but make him INTEGRAL and DELIGHTFUL!! He is written by a trans person, and played by a trans person: aka just a huge fucking slam dunk.
Thank you to Charlie Covell and Misia Butler for showing other trans writers and actors that it CAN be done, that there is space for us, and if anything, that it's more important than ever for us to tell our stories.
watching Kaos and I think the absolute most perfect character introduction choice ever in media history might be Dionysus appearing on screen for the first time to Abba's "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)".
The actor Jonathan Bailey sits at a large table in an otherwise empty room: charcoal cable knit sweater, loose pinstripe trousers, hair neatly coiffed. He is chewing gum, sipping coffee, talking through his recent career, and a certain serendipity that has rendered him reflective. At 36, he’s fresh from his turn as likely-lad love interest Fiyero in Hollywood’s blockbuster adaptation of Wicked; as a child, seeing the stage show was a milestone for him. “I remember thinking Fiyero was such a good part.” Later this year he will star in Jurassic World Rebirth alongside Mahershala Ali and Scarlett Johansson. “I saw the original Jurassic Park with my family, aged six, at the cinema,” he says. “It was the first time we all went together to something like that. It was seminal, but so rare for us.”
And this month, Bailey will star in Richard II at the Bridge Theatre, directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bailey is its protagonist. It is another example of full-circle career moment. In 2013, he appeared on stage in Hytner’s Othello. Same playwright, same director, same city – Bailey can’t help but consider all that’s changed in the intervening years. “Back then I was too young,” he says. “I came into the rehearsal process not mature or confident enough.”
Landing the role of Cassio, one of Othello’s lieutenants, had been so important to him then. “I didn’t go to drama school,” he says, “and there was a common belief that if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be able to do classical texts, or perform in the big theatres. There are all these stories we are born into that we have to unpick. For me, one of those was how limited I felt.”
Bailey remembers the day that changed. “It was late December,” he says, “and I was walking along London’s South Bank.” He was on his way to the National Theatre to meet Hytner for a callback. “I’d worked so hard and for so many reasons it felt…” He cuts himself off, then goes on, “Working at the National was beyond my wildest dreams.”
Bailey performed the two scenes he’d prepared. Then, Hytner unexpectedly suggested a third, which Bailey hadn’t rehearsed. “I’m not very good at just reading and going,” he says. “I can’t really come up with… Anyway, I went with instincts. He offered me the job in the room. It was a defining moment in my career.”
All sorts of opportunities followed for Bailey: American Psycho at the Almeida; Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s TV debut Crashing; King Lear opposite Ian McKellen; BBC satirical sitcom W1A. He was made very famous for playing a leading Lothario in Bridgerton, the Netflix behemoth. “Now being back with Nick,” he says. “I have a much fuller and more cherished understanding of him as a human as well as a director. Getting back into a room with him now, with all that’s happening, just felt obvious.”
Hytner’s praise for Bailey is just as high: “He can speak Shakespeare like it’s his first language… The stage is his element.”
It’s Wednesday lunchtime, early January, in a central London studio space. We’re meeting halfway through five weeks of Richard II rehearsals in full swing a few floors below us. He’s sitting at a large table. In front of him is a bulky script covered in yellow highlights. “It’s only half,” he says, flicking through, playful panic in his voice. “Not only that, I’ve thinned it, and taken out the scenes I’m not in, which feels very Richard II.”
It’s Bailey’s first stage production since 2022. Through Bridgerton, he has been exposed to a global audience. But theatre is where it all began. “So returning to the stage, now, just felt so right. And I don’t think I’ve changed at all, even if certain things around me have.” It has taken some adjustment, this new level of “Black Mirror-esque” notoriety that he’s experiencing. It’s why he likes the intimacy of these rehearsals, after months spent on sprawling film sets. And he’s enjoying being based in London for an extended period, close to friends and family.
Bailey is charming, handsome and self-effacing as we talk, but doesn’t seem entirely at ease. That gum chewing is fervent now; he’s fiddling with what’s in front of him. He habitually self-edits as he speaks. There’s a vagueness that, at times, feels purposeful. At regular intervals, he simply stops mid-sentence.
Take the play itself. “It’s such an incredible, searing interrogation of power, government and monarchy…” he says. “You have someone with the cast-iron right to rule, who is absolutely unfit to lead, emotionally underdeveloped… And Shakespeare wrote to be played, not published. There are so many references and nuances to what an Elizabethan audience would have understood… It’s about translating it from that, and delivering it to a modern audience, so the effect hopefully has the same vivid fervency and front-footedness especially politically and especially in this instance with monarchy and leadership.”
It sounds interesting. So where is he turning to for inspiration for his tyrannical overlord? I ask. Trump? King Charles? The Saudis?
“That’s for the viewer to see. I have very clear ideas and I hope the audience will, too…”
He won’t be drawn. I’m curious as to why. He shakes his head.
“You’ll have to come and see it.”
Later, over email, Hytner is more forthright: “The play wonders what happens when an entirely legitimate leader is set on ruining the country he leads. No good options. Submit or resist – either way you end up with chaos.”
Ahead of Wicked’s late-November release, there was a preview screening in Sydney. “It was part of this massive press tour, but for me it only lasted two weeks. The girls are incredible,” Bailey says of his co-stars Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, plugging the project for months on end. “And they’re still at it, still shining.”
In Oz, Bailey went along with one of his sisters and her two daughters in tow. It was the first time he’d sat back and watched the film properly. “I was so overwhelmed,” he says. “Even now, it makes me quite emotional. If there was the purest form of joy I had as a kid, it was singing and dancing.”
His family was based between Reading and Oxford. Bailey has three older sisters. As a child, he’d be dropped at basketball club at the local village hall. “From outside, I could see my sister’s ballet lessons through the window. I wanted to be in there with them. I’d go and wait at the back of their class in my Velcro trainers.” He enrolled. “I was obsessed and loved it. Dancing and singing felt like a vocation.”
Music also filled the family home. By the time Bailey was 10, his sisters would go out clubbing. “The next morning, they’d come back, and I’d get them, hungover, to do impressions of their different friends dancing.” It was a family affair. “We loved 90s club classics. Me, Mum, Dad and my sisters went through a phase of going into the new room – we had an extension, then called it that for 20 years – and we’d put on vinyls and dance, all of us.”
One day, he stopped. “I don’t know what happened,” he says, “for whatever reason, I didn’t confidently carry through the dancing. I got self-conscious in my teens that it was signalling something else. It just didn’t feel… I probably just knew it was better to be playing rugby than dancing. I became really self-conscious. There weren’t other dudes dancing.” One teacher called Bailey a “fairy” in front of his entire class. “In your teenage years it’s so raw. You lose your skin. And there are certain things in life,” he says, “that allow people to think they know something about you, and those assumptions mean you stop doing something you love. You curb or you police yourself. You don’t make the joke, or say the quip. You don’t stand up and advocate for yourself or your friends. And you start to slowly crumple. That’s purely on the basis of this idea of signalling. These stereotypes.”
One becomes fearful, he continues, of the immense hurt that others can cause. “Even more pain than binding yourself up slowly and creating a space of safety and refuge in your own mind or heart. That’s where it gets dangerous and people stop doing the things they’re supposed to. And how brilliant that we…” He pauses, surprised, concerned even – it seems – by how much he’s sharing. “It’s a scary time, isn’t it. On the one hand, I do think there’s such a… People are so much more open-minded about what defines masculinity now. What defines heterosexuality. What defines gender. But on the other hand, there’s a swing, obviously, towards… Anyway, that one will have to be a dot-dot-dot for you.”
It’s not that Bailey dropped performing as a child, only that things took off in a different direction. Back in ballet class, there’d been a callout from the Royal Shakespeare Company. “They needed young boys to play Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.” He was seven years old. “My parents weren’t sure. It was so outside their world.” His mum worked in the NHS. “And Dad was a DJ, basically, in Piccadilly Circus at [70s nightclub] Snoopys.” But a child actor? “It’s a big ask, from a kid. I was really protected by them, but they gave me this opportunity.” He was cast, and continued to be through school. “It was extraordinary, really. I didn’t miss any lessons. By 13, I’d done three productions for the RSC, and a stint in the West End. All before I hit puberty.”
Then came his first Shakespeare production: Prince Arthur in King John at the Barbican with the RSC. “I was 12 or 13, and that set me on another course. ‘Fuck, OK, you can also do this.’” The memories are visceral, even now: “The sickly, sweet smell of fake blood. Dry ice. All those senses. I was taken. That’s maybe where my creative juices were channelled more, over singing and dancing.”
He has worked solidly since his teenage years. Bridgerton, though, catapulted him to stardom. Afterwards, says Bailey, “I was contending with how things would change in my life.” The press introduction, a growing, global fandom, interest in his personal life and sexuality…
“On one hand,” he says, “the success of Bridgerton, being able to play that role, and for who I am not to affect people’s perceptions; the love story between a man and a woman.” He pauses, again. Oh, actually.” Some nervous laughter.
“It’s just, I’m cautious. I’m who I am and always will be. It’s an extraordinary thing to see and hear the word ‘gay’ next to your name all the time. It’s something I’m incredibly proud of, but it’s also not something anyone else would be defined by. So to go straight from Bridgerton, where inevitably that was talked about, to do a series like Fellow Travellers? It came along like some sort of beacon.”
Fellow Travellers, a Showtime series in which Bailey and Matt Bomer star, follows the romance between two American politicos, from the 1950s to 1980s. Production started as series one of Bridgerton started streaming. Among a predominantly queer central cast, cocooned on set, Bailey’s sexuality was entirely un-noteworthy. “All with our own experiences,” he says, “coming together. And learning about the history… The men who endured and experienced such horrendous and extraordinary things.”
Simultaneously, he was inundated with requests from charities following Bridgerton’s success. “I felt frozen by wanting to help.” The sheer scale of what was being asked and what he might do with his platform, connections and cash felt overwhelming. So, he founded the Shameless Fund. “Raising cash and erasing shame to support the global LGBTQ+ community. We’re giving grants this year. I’m so proud of it. It was all in theory. It seems so obvious and clear. We’ve raised a lot of money for initiatives that need cash and a platform.
“And the thing is,” he says, “I can’t be a mouthpiece. I’m an actor.” As is clear through our conversation so far, he’s impassioned and engaged, but being outspoken doesn’t always feel comfortable. It must be challenging, I say. So many eyes and ears pointed in his direction.
“The noise is turned up,” he says. “And when it’s about your family, or your identity… And nobody is going to question that headline, in a different outlet with their own agenda. That’s what’s left and it isn’t true. That’s why I’m really protective. I’ve seen something so specific about my identity be twisted. Ultimately you want peace within yourself, because the world is wild enough as it is. It’s too important now, with rights being stripped away. What’s so obviously looming…”
Back to Wicked, I suggest.
“OK,” he says, relieved, “so I was doing Cock [his West End stint in Mike Bartlett’s comedy about sexual identity] and I knew a film of Wicked was happening.” In the dressing room before curtain up one night, Bailey recorded a self-tape. “As I was singing, doing a karaoke version of [Fiyero’s big number] Dancing Through Life, I got called to stage on the Tannoy. Fuck it, I just sent it.” There were some positive noises. “Then the dates didn’t look to be working out. Wicked said they couldn’t be sure about what they wanted…” Bailey made other plans. Then, out the blue, dates shifted: the part was his. The months that followed were hectic: during one stretch, while juggling Fellow Travellers, Bridgerton and Wicked, he was filming for 34 days straight.
“I’d come from set, sleep on a flight, go straight to a Bridgerton ball, then the next day be dancing with Ari and Cynthia. Everyone else for Wicked had three months of rehearsal. I had three days.”
There’s a knock at the door: Bailey is being summoned back down to rehearsals. “The conclusion to that,” he says, “is Wicked happened and I’m so proud. Before I knew it I was Dancing Through Life…” Suffice to say, he’s thrilled to be.
Richard II is at the Bridge Theatre until 10 May, bridgetheatre.co.uk
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