In this new regular feature, we bring together two members of our community who share the same profession but come from different eras to explore their takes on growing up, careers, life, love and more. Here, actor Paul Clayton, 68, and Bridgerton’s James Phoon, 30, explore what they can learn from their side of the generation gap…

As told to Dale Fox

Photography Markus Bidaux

PAUL CLAYTON

JAMES PHOON

‘THEY WERE TOLD to cash in their pensions and spend their savings because they were going to die,” says actor Paul Clayton, 68, reflecting on the gay men who lived through the height of the AIDS crisis.

Opposite him, James Phoon, 30, listens carefully. “It’s something I think about a lot,” he says. “How a generation above me had such a completely different experience to what I’m having now… it’s so impossible to compute.”

This is the first in Attitude’s Queer & Now series, where we bring together LGBTQ+ people who work in the same field but have lived through different eras to connect, reflect and uncover the threads that link their lives.

It’s the first time these two actors have met, but their connection is instant. For a full hour, they sit across a table and just talk — unprompted and uninterrupted — about growing up, coming out, and carving out space in a world that hasn’t always made it easy.

Clayton, whose long list of credits includes Peep Show, House of the Dragon and Coronation Street, grew up in South Yorkshire as an adopted only child. “It felt like, if you were telling someone you were gay, you were saying, ‘I’m going to die,’” he says, recalling his early years of self-discovery.

Phoon, known for Bridgerton, Wreck and his work on the West End stage, grew up in a busy household in East Sussex. His coming out was sudden, and on his own terms. “It was the middle of the night, on a school night. I went up to my mum’s room and knocked on her door.”

Clayton and Phoon’s lives span different decades, but they speak a shared language — one shaped by fear, joy, resilience and the need to be seen. They talk about identity, love, rejection, and the slow evolution of queer representation on screen. There are differences — in context, in culture, in what was possible. But the similarities are striking: childhood moments of queer recognition, the ache of hiding, the freedom in finding your voice.

What follows is their conversation, unfiltered and in their own words. Two queer actors, years apart, finding common ground in the lives they’ve led — and the truths they still carry.

“I GOT TO A POINT WHERE I THOUGHT, ‘I HAVE TO COME OUT RIGHT NOW’”

— JAMES PHOON

CHILDHOOD

James Phoon: I grew up in Hove with lots of brothers and sisters, and all my family is still there, so I go back quite a lot.

Paul Clayton: I’m from South Yorkshire, a bit more industrial — Rotherham. An only child. My mother hadn’t been able to have children and lost a couple of children, and I was adopted, so I had the heightened luxury of being a single child.