Madison Bailey Rises Up
Cosmopolitan US|Issue 03, 2023 / May 2023
The 24-year-old Outer Banks star is evolving into her highest form in real time, in front of an audience of millions.
By Tre'Vell Anderson. Photographs by Josefina Santos
Madison Bailey Rises Up

One thing is abundantly clear after spending a few hours with Madison Bailey: She isn't interested in wearing a mask that grins and lies, as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar once wrote. She'd much prefer to show the truth of her reality and to live in a world where that's the norm. "If everyone were just 10 percent more honest, we would see a lot of shit changing," she says over lunch at a French bistro just outside Los Angeles.

"I want to be respected. I want people to think I'm glamorous. I want people to see pictures of me and be like, 'She's stunning," she continues. "But I also want people to know that I don't look like that every day. I'm not perfect, and I'm trying to show y'all I'm not."

It's a refreshing departure from the going-rate expectation that the people on our television screens be different (read: better) than us. But it's also Madison's rare kind of Hollywood magic: People feel like they really know her because she's not interested in publicly being anything but herself.

For fans of the North Carolina native, this won't come as such a surprise. From her earliest roles in 2015 (on Constantine and Swamp Murders) to her multi-episode arc on The CW's Black Lightning to now three seasons of the wildly successful Netflix adventure drama Outer Banks, she's been as open a book as possible. About being a mixed-race Black daughter of white adoptive parents. About living with borderline personality disorder. About being pansexual and in a loving relationship with her girlfriend of three years, former UNC Charlotte basketball player Mariah Linney. (At one point during our chat, Madison shows me a video just sent to her by a friend who's on a snowboarding trip with Mariah. "Here goes my girl. She looks like she's having a blast....Yeah, get some energy out because I can't hear about snowboarding again," she jokes.)

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Issue 03, 2023 / May 2023 من Cosmopolitan US.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة Issue 03, 2023 / May 2023 من Cosmopolitan US.

ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.

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