Regé-Jean Page Talks James Bond Rumors, Overnight Success, and Sci-Fi Fans

Photography by Nick Thompson

Styled by Oliver Volquardsen

Regé-Jean Page is soaking up the silence while he still can. The week before we speak, he was walking the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival, all smiles in paparazzi photographs as a guest of Armani. But right now, he’s in London, apologizing for being so out of breath. For the time being, he’s swapped life in front of a camera lens for tiring, but comparatively low-maintenance, work: He’s helping a friend renovate their house. “It’s been screwdrivers and shovels today,” he says. “Normally, it’s air travel and tickets and itineraries.” 

You would have assumed that groundshift occurred in tandem with Bridgerton, but Page recalls it differently. Ask him when it feels like things changed and he’ll take you back further, to a quieter encounter; to Santa Monica Beach in 2016. Malachi Kirby, alongside whom Page starred in Roots, a remake of the beloved 1970s series that traced the life of a Black man back to his enslaved ancestors, had come to stay with him. “Some random dude just walked by and did a double take. He was like, ‘Ey, it’s the boys from Roots!’,” he recalls. It was surreal to the bypasser, but to Page too. Okay, cool, he thought. My face kind of belongs to that now. 

The experience, while perhaps insignificant to some, was the start of a new life for the actor. He had a realization: “You’re now carrying yourself in your everyday life with a certain number of people [watching],” he says. “You’re just on the screen, but they went through some stuff with you.” As an actor, Page might have experienced the emotional tumult months earlier on set, shooting the scene a fan might have watched on television the night before. It was like an echo effect, “but it doesn’t bounce back to you for six months, or a year, or sometimes even two years.” 

Bridgerton’s “echo” was more like an ear-splitting explosion for the cast and crew: it became the most watched Netflix Original show on the platform within weeks of airing (only later did Squid Game overtake it). It solidified Page’s stardom. And then, after becoming the defining male face of period dramas, he made the bold but necessary decision to move on. 

That had always been the plan: Page and Rhimes had had the discussion prior to production on season two being announced. “I’m never particularly itching to do what I’ve just done, which is always the industry’s inclination,” he says, when I ask why he wasn’t interested in doing a second season after the show’s success. “Half the reason I became an actor is for the expansion of the boundaries in your experience, of being able to go to new places that you can’t go to in real life, but being able to share that experience with an audience that you may not ever physically meet until they yell at you on Santa Monica beach.” He describes his approach to picking what would come next as “an openness that I’ve always had…wanting to be aware of whatever I’m doing and continuing to expand my experience.” Sometimes that can mean doubling down, and strengthening the muscles you’ve already built, “but sometimes that can be going right to the other end of the spectrum and doing something entirely different.” 

And so that’s what Page did. His first role after Bridgerton kept him within the comforting hands of Netflix, but was a sharp genre shift: the action spy thriller The Gray Man, directed by the Russo Brothers of Avengers fame. This time he played Carmichael, a modern arch-villain with a slice of vintage Bond about him, directing mercenaries to take out a rogue assassin. 

These post-breakout moves matter; one might have wondered why Page wanted to go from something lavish and intimate to something so massive. That assessment is subjective, Page thinks: “The most intimate kitchen sink dramas can, if you do them right, feel like the most epic Greek [tragedy] because that’s how big the feelings are,” he insists. “And if you do your Mike Leigh drama right, it’s soul-shattering on a level that feels as expansive as Infinity War.” 

The Gray Man co-starred blockbuster heavyweights too, including Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, and Ana de Armas, placing Page, for the first time, in the company of Hollywood stars of a different caliber. They, like Page, are all actors who’ve been confronted with sex symbol status—something that can twist an actor’s ambitions, reducing them wholly to their looks. Did he recognize that in his co-stars? They didn’t talk about it on set, he says, but he recognized how they performed without vanity, shunning that framing. “The most intriguing thing about that group of actors is how well they change gears, and how effective they are at adapting to any given situation.” Maybe that interacts with the question I asked, he thinks, “but I suppose the only way that really interacted with me was seeing how little bearing [sex symbol status] has in real life as opposed to what you read online.” The movie was a success, with over 250 million hours of it viewed globally on Netflix thus far. A sequel is already in the works. 

Earlier this year, in an interview with The Cut, Page had mentioned that he had a line-up of projects that he wasn’t allowed to talk about. Days after we speak, one of them was announced: a TV collaboration with the Russo Brothers that would reimagine the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid story, co-starring Top Gun: Maverick’s Glen Powell. Alongside that is an in-progress revival of The Saint, another spy thriller with literary roots. Page is set to play the lead role. 

It’s heavily rumored that Page will be the next James Bond, too; an anonymous contributor to the gossip site Deux Moi claimed he had “most likely gotten the role” already. I ask, rather nebulously, if he’s signed on to any new projects that the public doesn’t know about yet. You can hear his smirk: “There are many things people don’t know about, and they continue to be ‘in progress.’ People will know about them at a point that’s sufficient.” He plays these conversations with both a charm and a sense of factual robustness. Whether he’s got the role or not, that seems like a good mix for 007 too. 

Page is loving the worlds he finds himself in, regardless of what’s still to come. He compares the job to being a character in the classic science-fiction time-travel series Quantum Leap, with new environments and people at his fingertips every time he steps on set. “If there are privileges to this job, it’s having new worlds on something like a sushi conveyor belt, floating by, and getting to dip in and appreciate and expand yourself and your being.” Whether that’s a spy, a spy hunter, a Regency-era heartthrob, or a fantasy superhero, there’s a pleasure, he finds, in doing it all over again each time: “There are infinite opportunities for more life,” he says. 

But for now, Page is heading back to the garden to get his hands dirty; to find that spare Ikea screw. Here and now, the limelight only exists in some far-flung space he doesn’t have to think about in the current moment. He likes that. “Sometimes you’ve got to appreciate the subtleties and the quiet moments of life,” he insists, calling himself “a connoisseur of peace.” 

“I just throw myself into chaos when it’s needed.”