Easily one of the most talked-about topics of new series Bridgerton, which dropped on Netflix on Christmas, is the actor who plays Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings: Regé-Jean Page.
And understandably so. Not only is Page a fantastic actor, but he’s also… rather eye-catching. Ahead, we share everything we’ve managed to dig up on the 30-year-old British actor:
He’s moved around a few times
Page was born in Zimbabwe but moved to London as a teenager where he enrolled in the Drama Centre London. Today, he splits his time between London and Los Angeles.
He’s always been a performer
In an interview with InStyle, Page describes himself as having been a “musical, loud, bouncing-around-the-house” kid.
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His first acting gig was playing The Little Drummer Boy in his school’s nativity play. “And oh how I played!” he told Netflix’s Queue in a Q&A. “Such drums, such playing! I clearly had a career in musical theatre ahead of me and somewhere took a left turn and started getting all dour and serious and doing emotionally broken dukes.”
He’s humble
When asked in the same interview what inspired him to pursue a career in acting, Page joked: “Not being very good at anything else at all.”
He went on to say that his initial dream was to be an explorer, and that acting was the closest thing to that. “It’s about exploring and getting the opportunity to live in worlds and understand people that I would have no reason otherwise to interact with,” he explained.
“One day I can be a spaceman, the next day I can be president, the day after that I can travel 200 years in the past. It’s this really freeing profession.”
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Also, to further prove his humbleness, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, when it was suggested to Page that, as a good-looking actor, he might have something in common with Simon in terms of not knowing if he was interested in him purely based on his surface-level appeal, Page answered: “If you [meet] one, you’d have to ask him what that’s like.”
He’s passionate about spotlighting Black joy
Before Bridgerton, Page played Chicken George in miniseries Roots – a role which prompted him to seek out projects that showcased Black joy and love, specifically in period dramas.
“My big entrance into this industry was playing an enslaved person, which is an absolute cliché of people of colour,” he told InStyle.
“What happens in culture often is, you go back in time and only white folks are happy. And you know what? We’ve all known how to smile since the beginning of time. We’ve all gotten married since the beginning of time. We’ve all had romance, glamour and splendour. Representing that is incredibly important, because period drama for people who aren’t white shouldn’t mean only spotlighting trauma.
“If we’ve endured white Jesus for this long, then folks can endure a Black Duke.”
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He has also said a “huge part” of why he signed up to his roles in Bridgerton and Roots was to remind audiences that people of colour have always existed in history, even if their stories haven’t been told.
“Because we exist and have existed and we will exist in absolutely every walk of life from the beginning of time to the end of it,” he told EW. “There is something of a deficit to be readdressed there. We’re at a moment in time where it part of my job for people in my generation of artists to start telling those stories and filling them in.”
After Roots, Page also went on to star in Shondaland’s show For the People and in Sylvie’s Love, a romantic film set in 1960s Harlem.
He’s a romantic
Though Page has yet to share on his own romance status, he’s openly talked about being a romantic. “I’m a huge fan of romance as a concept,” he told EW. “Romance is a wonderful thing and we need more of it in the world.”
“Most things at their core are love stories anyway, whether they realise it or not. It’s hilarious, the more seriously a show tries to take itself and detach itself from that, the more that the love story generally tends to come forward.”
He takes his acting very seriously
Not only was Page heavily involved in the costume fittings for Bridgerton, but he also learnt to box and dance, carry himself in the Regency style, and perfected his horse-riding skills in preparation for filming the series. The process apparently left him “very sweaty for months,” he told EW.
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Also, when describing his dream part, Page says it would be “something I couldn’t even imagine yet because it’s so far out of my experience that I could only possibly discover it through surprise: I didn’t even know this was a thing. I had no idea that this character could exist.”
Bridgerton is now streaming on Netflix.