Jonathan Bailey can officially add People’s 2025 Sexiest Man Alive to his resume.
Bailey, 37, was revealed as this year’s hottest honoree during the Monday, November 3, episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
The Wicked star stepped out on stage sporting a chic black sweater and trousers. When Fallon, 51, asked Bailey how he felt about earning the title, he replied, “I mean, it’s an honor of a lifetime.”
He joked, “And I want to say, Jimmy, thank you so much for turning it down so that I could be here.”
Bailey, who learned the news earlier this year, said that it wasn’t hard to keep it secret.
“Surprisingly not, no,” he said. “Because not many people are going, “Are you … ?”
Fallon held up two different covers of the Sexiest Man Alive issue: In one, Bailey is standing in the ocean with a smoldering stare; in the other, he’s holding his dog, Benson.
Bailey’s big reveal comes days after Dancing With the Stars announced that judge Derek Hough won the Sexiest 40-Year-Old category in People’s Sexiest Man Alive 2025 Reader’s Choice Poll. Before announcing the news, the ABC reality show shared a clip of Hough reacting to being nominated — and declaring a major hairdo change if he won.
“No way I’m winning this. I think the other guys were like Cristiano Ronaldo and Lewis Hamilton or someone else. … Babe, I’m so confident that I’m not gonna win it, that if I were to win that, I would shave my head,” he said to wife Hayley Erbert in the clip. “I would shave my head, and I’ve never shaved my head, I think, in my life. Except for when I was like 5.”
Erbert replied, “You heard it here first, people. He’ll shave his head. Let’s get him to win that thing.”
Hough, however, refused to shave his head during the live show. DWTS season 34 contestant Dylan Efron also won the category for Sexiest Tattoos.
Last year, People named John Krasinski as the 2024 hunk.
“Just immediate blackout, actually. Zero thoughts,” Krasinski, 46, told the outlet of his reaction at the time. “Other than maybe I’m being punked. That’s not how I wake up, thinking, ‘Is this the day that I’ll be asked to be Sexiest Man Alive?’ And yet it was the day you guys did it. You guys have really raised the bar for me.”
The Office alum noted that wife Emily Blunt — with whom he shares daughters Hazel, 11, and Violet, 9 — was “very excited” when she heard of her husband’s new status. (The couple tied the knot in 2010.)
“There was a lot of joy involved in me telling her,” he said, noting that Blunt jokingly shared she would wallpaper their home with the cover if he won. “Do we have that on camera? Because that’s like a binding contract, I think. My children will love that, it won’t be weird at all.”
Jokes aside, Krasinski gushed over his life in Brooklyn with Blunt.
“It’s that beautiful thing where when you’re married to someone, you’re constantly learning and changing and evolving,” he said. “And I’m so lucky to go through all that with her.”
In Krasinski’s eyes, however, the title doesn’t change his duties around the house. “I think it’s going to make me do more household chores,” he said. “After this comes out, she’ll be like, ‘All right, that means you’re going to really earn it here at home.’”
