Jonathan Bailey has his next lead role. Variety reported today that he will star in “Insomniac City,” a gay romance film from director Dominic Cooke. Bailey plays the writer and photographer Bill Hayes, opposite Bill Nighy as the neurologist Oliver Sacks.
Jonathan Bailey Takes Lead Role in ‘Insomniac City’
Variety called it another booked lead for the actor. He is also on the producing side. Bailey sits on the producer list alongside Troy Lum and Andrew Mason of the UK-Australian company Brouhaha Entertainment, the outfit behind “Elsinore,” plus Mike Goodridge and Gabrielle Tana.
Altitude is handling worldwide sales and will introduce the project to buyers at AFM.
Hayes himself co-wrote the screenplay with Cooke. That matters. The man whose love story is being told helped decide how it gets told.
The Film Explores Love and Loss in New York City
Hayes published “Insomniac City” as a memoir in 2017. According to Variety, the film follows him as he moves from San Francisco to New York City after a devastating loss. He starts rebuilding his life there. Then he falls, unexpectedly, for two things at once: the city and Oliver Sacks.
Order is everything in that story. Grief first. Love second.
Hayes did not get what most screen romances hand their couples, two people with nothing in their way. He arrived in New York City from San Francisco after a devastating loss. Falling in love in that state is a strange, disorienting thing. Part of a person is still facing backward while another part is suddenly facing forward, and neither half gets to win cleanly.
Bill Nighy Joins Bailey as Oliver Sacks
Nighy takes on a man the public already knows. Sacks wrote “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “Awakenings,” the book behind the Academy Award-nominated film with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. Variety notes he was celebrated for the humanity and curiosity he brought to neurology.
Jonathan Bailey gets the harder assignment in some ways. Hayes is the narrator of his own memoir, the person the audience sees the whole thing through, and he is alive to watch the result.
Variety describes the relationship as one that changed both men’s lives during Sacks’s final years. So the film carries a clock inside it from the opening scene. Hayes found love after loss with someone whose time was limited. Two people chose each other, and that choice sits at the center of the story.
Themes of Grief and Hope at the Heart of the Film
Producers are pitching the film as an intimate and uplifting portrait of grief, hope, community and second chances. The official description, quoted by Variety, closes on “the remarkable possibility of finding love when it is least expected.”
Least expected is the honest part of that line. Nobody plans a second chance. Hayes moved to New York City from San Francisco after a devastating loss. He fell in love with the city and Oliver Sacks.
Grief and new love tend to get treated as opposites, as though one has to finish before the other can start. Hayes’s story, at least as the producers describe it, does not work that way. The loss and the love sit in the same chapter, with the restless backdrop of New York City around both.
Jonathan Bailey now has to carry that on screen, opposite one of Britain’s most recognisable actors, in a story the real Hayes helped write.
No release date or filming schedule has been announced. Buyers get their first look at AFM.
Sources: Variety
