Before Bridgerton made him a heartthrob, Jonathan Bailey was just a teenager in Oxford who couldn’t stop thinking about Brokeback Mountain. Nearly two decades later, the newly crowned PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive says the Oscar-winning film didn’t just move him, it changed his life.
A Movie That Shifted Everything
In a new interview with Esquire U.K., Bailey shared that watching Brokeback Mountain as a teen “completely activated” him. The film, which starred Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two cowboys in a forbidden romance, struck a chord that went far deeper than he expected.
“For my dissertation, I started writing about the representation of Hutus and Tutsis in films about the Rwandan genocide,” Bailey recalled. “Then Brokeback Mountain came out. I can’t remember if I just wanted an excuse to go back ten more times to see it, but I was completely activated.”
The actor quickly changed course, deciding to center his school project on “the representation of homosexuality in the film.”
Finding Support and Identity
Bailey wrote the essay under the guidance of one of his favorite teachers, Dr. David Brunton, at Magdalen College School in Oxford, England. When he shared his new idea, Brunton didn’t hesitate to encourage it.
“I remember coming to him and saying, ‘I want to do this,’ and he said, ‘Do you know what? I think you’re on to something,’” Bailey said.
That vote of confidence meant everything. “He saw me for who I was,” Bailey told Esquire U.K., describing Brunton as “the most incredible, inspiring person.” The actor even joked that his “fastidiously researched essay” earned him a very good mark.
The Power of Representation
Released in 2005, Brokeback Mountain became a cultural touchstone for queer storytelling in mainstream cinema. Its unflinching portrayal of love and repression between two men broke barriers, and clearly left an impression on a generation of viewers like Bailey.
The film’s legacy, paired with Bailey’s own success as an openly gay actor in major roles (Bridgerton, Fellow Travelers), underscores how far LGBTQ+ representation has come since he first watched it.
And while his essay may have started as an excuse to rewatch the movie, it ended up shaping the way he thinks about queer visibility on screen, a topic he continues to champion nearly twenty years later.
