Bridgerton‘s Jonathan Bailey has signed on to star in Showtime’s limited series Fellow Travelers, based on the novel Thomas Mallon. Showtime greenlit the romantic thriller in April 2022 with Emmy nominee Matt Bomer (The Normal Heart, The Boys in the Band) announced to star and executive produce.
Allison Williams (Get Out, Girls) is also confirmed to star. Filming’s expected to begin in Toronto later this month.
The eight-episode limited series comes from Oscar nominee Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia). Nyswaner executive produces with Bomer, Robbie Rogers, and Daniel Minahan. Minahan (American Crime Story: Versace) will direct episodes one and two.
“As a thrilling and deeply moving exploration of character and American life in the latter half of the past century, Fellow Travelers shines an unprecedented light on stories that are as urgent today as ever,” said Jana Winograde, President of Entertainment, Showtime Networks Inc. “The series delivers us directly into an insider world of Washington rife with national consequences, while drawing out the intimate moments that are profoundly personal and often heartbreaking.”
Jonathan Bailey will star as Tim Laughlin, “a young Fordham University graduate, earnest about his political and religious convictions and filled with optimism about the post-WWII future.”
Showtime released the following description of Fellow Travelers:
“Fellow Travelers is an epic love story and political thriller chronicling the volatile romance of two very different men who meet in the shadow of McCarthy-era Washington. Handsome and charismatic Hawkins Fuller (Bomer) avoids emotional entanglements – until he meets Tim Laughlin (Bailey), a young man brimming with idealism and religious faith.
They begin a romance just as Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn declare war on ‘subversives and sexual deviants,’ initiating one of the darkest periods in 20th-century American history. Over the course of four decades, Hawk and Tim cross paths through the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, the drug-fueled disco hedonism of the 1970s, and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, while facing obstacles in the world and in themselves.”
