LOUIS VUITTON jacket and boots, ULYSSE NARDIN watch, and ROBERTO COIN earrings, necklace, bracelet, and ring. — **LOUIS VUITTON** jacket and boots, **ULYSSE NARDIN** watch, and **ROBERTO COIN** earrings, necklace, bracelet, and ring.

Even a spotty wi-fi connection and 1,200-plus miles of distance can’t quell Madison Bailey’s contagious laughter. As I joke with the actor about our feeling “like Tony freakin’ Hawk” anytime we can successfully skateboard down the street without falling, and commiserate over the Covid vaccine side effects, I can’t help but feel as though I’m falling back into step with someone I’ve known for years. With her hair piled on top of her head, leopard print tank top strap twisted on her shoulder, and a New York Knicks bag slung over the back of her chair, Bailey could be any other 22-year-old—though not just any 22-year-old can put a breakout role on a Netflix smash hit on their resumé.

Bailey catapulted to fame with her starring role of Kiara Carrera, an outspoken and quick-thinking teenager navigating her upper-class background with her lower-class friends—or “Pogues”—in last summer’s hit Netflix series, Outer Banks, which will enjoy its much-anticipated second season this summer. “I like Kiara’s spirit,” Bailey says with a laugh. “She’s a tough chick, and it’s very fun to add in the tough chick that lives inside of me and marry the two.” Though Bailey considers herself “feminine in every way,” she admits that growing up with three brothers helped her bring out the adventurous spirit of Kiara. “We would go to the creek and collect salamanders and frogs,” she shares. “We were always outside on bikes or scooters or horseback riding or fishing. As kids, we’d go build forts in the yard. We were never inside.”

FENDI dress, bra, briefs, and hair clips. — **FENDI** dress, bra, briefs, and hair clips.

Like Kiara, Bailey also plays a protective role in her friend group (though unlike the Pogues, the actor and her friends don’t regularly enjoy boat chases under a hail of gunfire, break into active crime scenes, or go hunting for missing treasure). “It’s safe to say that me and my friends never get into the same shit they’re getting into,” she chuckles. In the case of her own friendships, Bailey often finds herself doling out relationship advice, which perhaps Kiara could use, having twice broken the cardinal rule of “no Pogue-on-Pogue macking.”

While Kiara ended the first season, presumably, in the arms of the bright, trepidatious Pope Heyward (Jonathan Daviss), fans of the show have created an impassioned case that she is best suited with firecracker surfer, JJ Maybank (Rudy Pankow). But if you ask Bailey what “team” she’s on, she offers a view far different from what fans probably want to hear. “I think Kiara needs to really figure out where she stands, because she’s still in the middle of this Pogue-Kook thing,” she says, referring to Kiara’s struggle to fit in with either of the island’s dominant socioeconomic classes. “It’s too confusing to add other people to it. So I would say, love yourself first, and then figure out who is for you.”

FENDI dress, bra, briefs, and hair clips, STUART WEITZMAN shoes, and ROBERTO COIN ring. — **FENDI** dress, bra, briefs, and hair clips, **STUART WEITZMAN** shoes, and **ROBERTO COIN** ring.

It takes fewer than five minutes into OB’s pilot episode for Kiara to launch into her first environmentally-charged spiel of the series. “Biggest pet peeve?” she declares “Easy. Giving 1% to the environment. We only have one earth, Pope, we should be giving it 100%. Bare minimum.” A zealous eco warrior, Kiara can often be heard railing against microplastics, or waxing poetics about saving the turtles. Bailey may not personally possess the same unyielding obligation to our planet, but she certainly plays her part in living a more sustainable lifestyle. “I do have a very basic respect that a lot of people don’t have for the environment that we live in,” she says. For her part, she cuts down on waste by implementing reusable grocery bags, dryer sheets, silicon containers, and masks into her day-to-day activities. “Seeing how many masks are in the ocean after this freaking pandemic is scary!” she cries.

But actors are not their characters, no matter how earnest the conflation. While Bailey cares for the environment, her true passion is racial justice. As a Black woman adopted into a white family from North Carolina, Bailey believes that the racial reckoning that swept the nation last summer was long overdue, yet still insufficient in terms of tangible progress. “I think everyone’s trying to figure out the part that they play in all of this,” she reflects, “and it’s especially taxing on people of color who know their place in this. We’ve been saying the same things for generations and generations.”

CHANEL jacket, top, pants, and jewelry, GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI shoes, and ULYSSE NARDIN watch. — **CHANEL** jacket, top, pants, and jewelry, **GIUSEPPE ZANOTTI** shoes, and **ULYSSE NARDIN** watch.

Bailey’s feelings on the matter border on misanthropic—and rightfully so. After a short while, Instagram infographics and performative activism lose their luster, like cheap gold plating wearing away to reveal the dull copper beneath. “Last summer, when everyone was going to a protest like every day, there was a certain energy there. But then there’s the feeling we can scream and yell all we want, but what’s it going to change?” Bailey, who refers to the centuries-old racism that plagues this country as “the war we’re currently in and have always been in,” doesn’t pretend to have the magical salve to heal such a deep wound. “We need a game plan. Well, what is that?” she ponders, trailing off. “I obviously don’t have all of the right answers in any way.”

Like a whopping majority of Generation Z, Bailey spends a great deal of time online, and was even fortunate enough to stumble into love over the internet. While finding a partner online has gone mainstream, unlike the Tinder madness that dominates the dating game, Bailey’s love story went off the beaten path when she found herself the subject of a modern sonnet: a thirst TikTok. Last year, she announced her relationship with University of North Carolina at Charlotte women’s basketball player Mariah Linney, following a flirtatious virtual meetup. Bailey, who identifies as pansexual, didn’t question the decision to announce her relationship with another woman, unlike many of Hollywood’s queer trailblazers. “I’ve been out since like 2017,” she says. “And then I got all of these followers and I was like, ‘Maybe I should like re-come out.’” Bailey has found herself frustrated that she is not visibly queer—a common vexation among cisgender, femme members of the LGBTQ+ community—and makes the effort to be loud and proud on social media. “Nobody would get on my page and be like, ‘She’s queer.’ And I want people to know that I’m queer, because I want to attract the audience that I want to attract. I want to find my people, so they need to know who I am so they can find me,” she explains.

LOUIS VUITTON top, shorts, and boots, ULYSSE NARDIN watch, and ROBERTO COIN earrings, necklace, bracelet, and ring. — **LOUIS VUITTON** top, shorts, and boots, **ULYSSE NARDIN** watch, and **ROBERTO COIN** earrings, necklace, bracelet, and ring.

With a cool 3.6 million followers on Instagram and 3.3 million on TikTok, Bailey has come a long way from the core two thousand she started with before Outer Banks was swept up by the rising tide of stan culture—the online movement whereby communities of stalker fans, or “stans”, enjoy extreme support of a celebrity online (called “stanning”). With such a massive uptick in eyes on her every move, she maintains a remarkable sense of nonchalance when considering her platform. “I mean, the way I feel is that all the people that I want to like me, like me. The energy that’s meant for me is here and if you wanna unfollow or follow me, that’s completely on you. Your opinion of me is none of my business.” She approaches her queerness, namely posting about her relationship, with the same laissez-faire attitude of self-assuredness. “It was 2020 when I posted [about my relationship]. I was like, ‘Surely no one’s going to be commenting something just absolutely brutal.’ If they do, I trust that the other people in the comments will take care of that. I wasn’t really worried about it,” she admits.

ZADIG & VOLTAIRE bodysuit, HERMÈS skirt, and PANDORA earrings and ring. — **ZADIG & VOLTAIRE** bodysuit, **HERMÈS** skirt, and **PANDORA** earrings and ring.

One such reason for Bailey’s refreshingly unstigmatized view of queerness is thanks to the growing LGBTQ+ community that lives online and in her algorithms. “I think where I ground myself is via the internet,” she says. “A lot of queer people, especially closeted queer people, just find a lot of comfort in knowing there are so many queer people, and so much queer content, and things that you will resonate with on the internet.” Bailey did not have the luxury of a large rolodex of fellow queer people while growing up in North Carolina, and noted that the pandemic was a familiar source of isolation from her community. “I don’t know a ton of queer people. My friends from high school are all straight… like all of them. And with the pandemic, it was harder to meet people.” Despite this, Bailey perseveres and is continuing to cultivate her ever-growing network of queer friends and creators online. “My whole TikTok for you page, it’s just so gay,” she grins. “All of it. It’s just so queer and gay. It’s awesome.”

I chat with Bailey at the beginning of Pride month, a week before California’s long-anticipated reopening date. But the actor has no time for parades or parties. She is days away from jetting off to Canada to film a new Netflix slasher film. “I have a two week quarantine the second I get there and then basically Pride month will be over,” she says. Fear not, though, for Bailey will be accompanied by her girlfriend, Mariah, and she is very confident the two of them will take matters of celebration into their own hands. “I will be celebrating Pride month very intimately, really just the two of us, being gay in the privacy of our own home,” she says with a coy giggle. As Bailey concludes: “That’s the grand old plan.”