Jonathan Bailey Wants Us All To Yearn A Little More

Jonathan Bailey may not have a romantic storyline in Jurassic World Rebirth the way he does in Bridgerton, Wicked, or Fellow Travelers — but make no mistake: Dr. Henry Loomis is a yearner. A double Ph.D. in passion and paleontology, if you will.

In Jurassic World Rebirth — which is now available to own and rent on digital — Bailey plays a bespectacled, dino-loving scientist who’s recruited for an expedition to an abandoned research island alongside Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali). Henry’s unbridled verve for prehistoric beings shapes one of the film’s most touching scenes, in which he cries during an up-close encounter with a titanosaur. After taking a moment to pet the huge creature’s leg, he steps back and gleefully whoops at the wonder of it all.

While the sci-fi context may be a new world for the 37-year old actor, the scene conveys a sense of awe and earnest fondness that permeates his swoon-worthy oeuvre — like Anthony telling Kate he’ll humble himself before her on Bridgerton, Fiyero and Elphaba’s fateful lion cub rescue in Wicked, or Tim’s decades-spanning devotion to Hawk in the Lavender Scare period drama, Fellow Travelers, which earned the star his first Emmy nod.

I caught up with Bailey during a recent Jurassic World Rebirth press trip to Thailand, where he opened up about sincerity as an important emotional undercurrent across his different roles and genres. “It’s so important to shamelessly show yearning. And I think yearning is a really good metric for value and for ethics as well,” Bailey tells Bustle, adding that it’s part of what drew him to the role of Dr. Loomis.

Bailey also explains how revealing that emotion can be in other genres. “For instance, in romance, you can say a lot about society and the codes and conventions and what is limiting and oppressing someone, by the way that they yearn for something that they feel they can’t have,” he says.

In Bridgerton, he adds, that might mean “social hierarchy or an expected sort of value on a woman and a man, how they come together,” he continues. “Obviously, in Fellow Travelers, that speaks for itself — especially the resonance in America at the moment.”

It’s not just that Bailey is exceptionally good at communicating those stakes, but it’s personally rewarding for him, too. “I really respond well to being able to inhabit big ideas that you feel and that you can channel in,” he says.

For example, Bailey adds that Henry’s emotional reaction in Rebirth — paired with a hilariously timed Altoid break in the middle of the dino-filled grassland — wasn’t originally written as such. “I think Loomis gets so angry about the way that the world is being treated,” he says. “It’s not in the script. He doesn’t need to talk about it. But in a moment of a surge of emotion like that, you see everything that he spent his life valuing and caring about.”

So even as he explores a new genre, Bailey brings the longing and doesn’t have any plans to stop.

“It’s never been a better time to be front-footed with showing [longing] in these small moments in film, because I think it resonates with people,” he says. “I think people feel things strongly.”