Every gay role Mary & George star Nicholas Galitzine has played to date
Red, White & Royal Blue isn’t Nicholas Galitzine’s first LGBTQ+ role on screen (Treasure Entertainment/YouTube)
Nicholas Galitzine’s star has continued to rise over the past year, following his huge role as closeted gay British royal Prince Henry in Red, White & Royal Blue, and now as King James VI and I’s gay lover, George Villiers, in Sky Atlantic’s limited series Mary & George.
Yet the rising, 29-year-old British actor, who identifies as straight, is no stranger to taking on LGBTQ+ roles in film and TV.
Following the recent release of Mary & George, in which George’s mother Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham (played by Julianne Moore), instructs him to seduce King James (Tony Curran), Galitzine addressed why he has chosen to play gay and bisexual characters.
“I think with all of these characters the thing that I find really intriguing as an actor is that underbelly of vulnerability and having to hide oneself. I’m very interested in identity; George is very different in a way because his sex and his sexuality is his power,” he said.
In Mary & George, Galitzine has more than his fair share of steamy gay sex scenes, with critics calling the historical psychosexual drama a “horny romp”.
“I think they’ve all just been really rich characters in of themselves,” Galitzine added, reflecting on his LGBTQ+ roles.
“You know, you read that in the script it just becomes a bit of a no-brainer.”
Here’s a rundown of all the times that Nicholas Galitzine has played gay or bisexual characters to date.
Angelo in Legends (2015)
Nicholas Galitzine’s first TV role came with a brief guest appearance in season two of TNT crime drama series Legends in 2015.
Episode five, “The Legend of Terrence Graves”, explored the secretive personal history of former MI6 handler Terrence Graves (played Ralph Brown, and in flashbacks by Rod Hallett), who it’s revealed has spent years being blackmailed over a past gay relationship with a young man named Angelo, played by Galitzine).
Conor Masters in Handsome Devil (2016)
One of Nicholas Galitzone’s earliest films roles came as closeted gay rugby player Conor Masters in John Butler’s 2016 LGBTQ+ comedy-drama Handsome Devil.
Co-starring Sherlock Andrew Scott, the film centres on Irish teenager Ned (Fionn O’Shea) after he is sent to an elite all-boys boarding school, where he strikes up a friendship with Conor, his roommate and the school’s star rugby player.
The film went on to win three awards at the FilmOut San Diego LGBT Film Festival in 2017.
Handsome Devil is currently available to stream on Prime Video and Disney+ in the UK.
Timmy Andrews in The Craft: Legacy (2020)
In 2020, Nicholas Galitzine starred in Zoe Lister-Jones’ The Craft: Legacy, a reboot and sequel-of-sorts to 1996 teen horror classic The Craft, starring Neve Campbell.
Galitzine plays high school bully and the film’s early antagonist Timmy Andrews, who later comes out as bisexual in a scene that provides a rare moment of bi male visibility on screen.
“It’s just… it’s felt good when it’s been with girls as well, so. It’s just hard for dudes”, Timmy tells Lily (Cailee Spaeny) during an unexpectedly heartfelt coming out scene.
“I feel like there’s no room to be… everyone assumes you’re just gay, and that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that at all, I just… I like both.”
The Craft: Legacy is currently available to rent on Prime Video in the UK.
George Villiers in Mary & George (2024)
Nicholas Galitzine is starring as George Villiers, the lover and ‘favourite’ of King James VI of Scotland and I of England, in Sky Atlantic drama Mary & George.
Inspired by Benjamin Woolley’s book The King’s Assassin and written by acclaimed playwright DC Moore (Killing Eve), the new seven-part series tells the story of how George’s mother Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore) moulded her beautiful and charismatic son to seduce the King and secure influence over the royal court.
If securing influence must involve getting very intimate with the King, then George is all too happy to oblige.
Mary & George is available now on Sky Atlantic and NOW in the UK and Ireland, and on Starz in the US from 5 April.
Prince Henry in Red, White & Royal Blue (2023)
In Nicholas Galitzine secured the most high-profile LGBTQ+ role of his career to date when he landed the part of closeted Prince Henry in the Mathew Lopez’ film adaptation of Casey McQuiston’s best-selling 2019 romantic novel Red, White & Royal Blue.
Both book and film chart the chaos, chemistry and transatlantic trysts that ensue after the son of the President of the United States (Taylor Zakhar Perez) is forced to fake a friendship with his British rival, the closeted gay royal, Prince Henry.
“One of my great fears is being misunderstood”, Galitzine told British GQ ahead of the film’s release on Prime Video. “Henry has to live with that every day…. It just felt like a beautiful story: someone who’s largely pretended to be someone else their whole life, and then this other person completely obliterates their worldview.”
Red, White & Royal Blue director Lopez may have insisted that he doesn’t want the film to be pigeon-holed as a ‘gay film’, but the filmmaker did recently stress to PinkNews the importance of showcasing gay intimacy on screen – a sentiment echoed by Galitzine earlier this year.
“It’s a crazy thing to be intimate in that way with your friend,” the actor told British GQ. “And we want people to fall in love with these characters, because their love has to be real.”
Red, White & Royal Blue drops on Amazon Prime on 11 August. You can purchase the book at Amazon or Bookshop.org.
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