by Natasha Wolff | April 6, 2026 9:56 am
Regé-Jean Page has a lot to say about romance
It makes sense: He’s had some serious experience. The dashing 38-year-old British actor is perhaps still best known for his smoldering Duke of Hastings on the first season of Netflix’s Bridgerton[1], which set Christmas 2020 ablaze.
“I check in every now and then [on Bridgerton] because I have a lot of friends there and people I love, and they do wonderful work,” he says of the show, which continues to be a smash hit in its fourth season, despite Page’s absence. “I’m not fully up to date, but I know enough not to be running around asking anyone to be my mistress any time soon.”
It’s taken Page five and a half years to return to the genre. But he finally has, Italian style, in You, Me & Tuscany[2], out in theaters this month from Universal. In a 2026 twist on Roman Holiday, he plays Michael, a lonely winemaker in central Italy who falls for the charms of Anna (Halle Bailey), an American chef who shows up from New York, pretending to be married to his cousin Matteo.
Don’t worry. It will all make sense when you see it on the big screen, which Page says was integral to his involvement in the project.
“We haven’t really seen romantic comedies in cinemas lately,” says Page, acknowledging that movies like You, Me & Tuscany have, over the past decade, become a staple of streaming services like Netflix, Peacock and Amazon Prime. “We’ve gotten into the habit of watching them at home, so I wanted to participate in that landscape coming back into bloom.”
The first time he watched the movie was at the Universal Studios screening room in central London. He was alone save for a security guard who’d taken his phone away “so I didn’t film the movie,” Page says, conceding it was a “very cold environment to see this type of film. Two guys who don’t know each other in a dark room.”
“But within about five minutes, I heard the first chuckle come from behind me,” Page recalls. “It was just a free, almost childish giggle. That gave me permission to chuckle and giggle. And now there are these two strangers—two fully grown men who have escaped from this busy concrete world—chuckling and giggling and enjoying this escape together, giving each other permission to do that. I found that to be an incredibly beautiful thing.”
It’s why Page is particularly thrilled that audiences will be able to experience the movie together, in public and on the big screen. “They’re going through something together,” he says. “It feels like an event.”
Page’s last few films, like the spy thriller Black Bag opposite Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender and the big-screen Dungeons and Dragons adaptation Honor Among Thieves, might not make you think so, but the actor believes “rom-coms and romances are very important.”
Not just as a shared experience, he explains, but as a self-improvement exercise.
“They’re movies where people talk through their problems and how to become better people. I think that’s a really important lens for people to see their lives through. It’s the human stuff,” Page says.
“Films reflect reality as it is, but they also reflect reality as it can be,” he continues. You, Me & Tuscany is a fantasy, an escape. “But everything in it is in the bounds of reality,” he says. “You can buy a ticket on an impulse and go somewhere as beautiful as Tuscany. It’s a real place. We didn’t make it up.”
Sure, Anna’s character in the movie tells a few white lies and gets in a little bit of emotional hot water, but, Page insists, to make life exciting you have to take a few risks and a few tumbles.
“You have to find people that will open up your view of the world,” Page says confidently. “You need to see life as beautiful in order to strive for life as beautiful. If you see it, you can be it. You need to see idealized versions of life in order to create them for yourself, to discover new ways of living that can fulfill you more.”
The audience may be experiencing a kind of adventure on screen, but, Page hopes, “when you leave the theater, you’re coming out singing the soundtrack, thinking, ‘You know what? That could be me! It’s not going to work out exactly the same way, but maybe I can break the shackles of a life that feel restrictive.’”
You don’t hear George Clooney and Julia Roberts or Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell[3] talking like this on Entertainment Tonight, do you? Applying the underpinnings of Ticket to Paradise or Anyone But You (which, by the way, was based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing) to the development of the human psyche? Well, it shouldn’t surprise you that Regé-Jean Page has a background in Shakespeare, having starred in The Merchant of Venice with Jonathan Pryce at London’s Globe in 2015.
“Regé appreciates the rom-com genre on a deep level,” says Kat Coiro, director of You, Me & Tuscany. She describes the actor as particularly multifaceted, “layered like a lasagna.”
“He never condescends,” she adds. “He embraces the joy and crowd-pleasing aspect. He knows what has come before, is aware of the tropes, the successes and the pitfalls. It all made him an incredibly valuable partner as we set out to make a big, theatrical rom-com.”
Of course, Page’s damn good looks help make things bigger and more thrilling. “The smolder in person is quite something to behold,” says Coiro. “The man knows how to work the camera, that’s for sure. But the smolder isn’t manufactured. It comes from having so much going on behind the eyes. The wheels are always turning.”
Want to know one thing Page’s wheels aren’t really turning about, especially now that he spent a few months in Italy playing an Italian vintner? Wine.
Go ahead. Imagine you’re in a nice restaurant like Carbone with Page. It’s a date. Everyone’s staring at you from around the room. “Who’s that with the guy from Bridgerton?” they’re all asking. You pass your date the wine list. He was just in a movie about wine. He’s got to have ideas. White or red, at least. So you ask: “What should we drink, Regé?”
“That’s my nightmare,” Page says. “My nightmare.”
Really? Yes, he confirms. “I can appreciate a good glass of wine, but I have nowhere near enough wine knowledge. I learned enough to get by, but the things you learn for an acting job tend to go in the same bucket as my lines go into. They are bright and vivid on the day, but as soon as the job is done, they disappear into the ether.”
Page can’t even name the best glass of wine he had during the production—not the grape, not the label, though he recalls the Airbnb he was staying in when he had it. Still, he more than makes up for it in wine vamping and setting the scene.
“The wine is about where you’re drinking it, when you’re drinking it, how you’re drinking it,” he stresses, noting that the only thing he brought back from Italy was coffee. “Anyone can have a great glass of wine, but they don’t know how good it tastes until they find the right person to drink it with.”
While you wonder if you should scratch your head in confusion or ask the sommelier for some advice, he keeps improvising. So, of course, you swoon, staring into his dark brown eyes.
“We were out on the balcony looking over the farm. There was a charcuterie board. I was looking out as the sun was going down,” Page remembers. “And the wine tasted so good. It’s possibly because it was very good wine, or possibly because of the environment we consumed it in.”
And you know what? He’s probably right.
Page insists he’s always been an earnest overthinker. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be an explorer,” he says. “Acting feels like a travel adventure. I get to live someone else’s life in a different place and report back the things I’ve seen. It’s almost like travel journalism, but for the psyche.”
When he’s not acting, Page splits his time between London and Los Angeles, usually in three-month cycles. “The two cities complement and refresh each other,” he says. In Southern California, he says he often has to be “very switched on.” In London, it’s calmer. He likes to get into the garden.
“I’m not very good at it, but it’s an activity,” Page says of gardening, which he insists is a pastime rather than a hobby. “It’s more of a kind of watering and singing to the plants and myself.” Usually that’s a soundtrack of Motown and a little bit of Sam Cooke. “The plants never object to Sam Cooke,” Page says. Who would?
Gardening returns him to his childhood in Zimbabwe, where his grandparents had a big farm. “I remember going out and picking fresh guavas and avocados,” he says.
These days, he doesn’t study gardening or even read about how to do it. “I just wander in and muddle about and work entirely off instinct. I’ll listen to the birds. It’s a grounding thing, when I can be just a human being,” Page says. “I should just call it ‘Time outside, getting my hands dirty and occasionally helping a plant if I’m lucky by mistake,’ but that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”
When he’s not getting his hands dirty in actual London dirt, Page has been sowing the seeds of a few streaming projects. There’s an erotic thriller called Hancock Park for Netflix and a rom-com for Apple based on the novel Funny You Should Ask by Elissa Sussman. Page has also been developing a new Great Gatsby for the West End stage.
“To my eyes, it’s the best interpretation of the spirit of the book that I’ve seen on paper anywhere,” he says. “It’s a book that lives between the lines.”
He’ll, naturally, play Jay Gatsby. “I like the idea of this chameleon with a past. His striving for this gilded world and his slight misunderstanding of how that will or won’t give him what he wants is almost Ripley-esque,” Page says. “I find him very tragic, but he represents all of us, in that way.”
Gardening and acting, I tell Page, certainly have a lot in common. He agrees. “You spend a lot of time tending to the bulbs,” Page says. Then all the flowers pop at once, in the springtime, and everyone sees the fruit of your labor. “It all happens very quickly, but you’ve spent a long time beforehand, beneath the soil.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time with acting, and I take it very seriously,” he says, shifting to a metaphor about a man who grows bamboo for years without any bamboo to show for himself, to the consternation of his friends. And then, overnight, the bamboo grows 6 feet and no one thinks he’s crazy anymore.
That’s sometimes what it feels like to work as an actor, he explains. “I probably take it slightly too seriously. But I enjoy it, seeing how far I can go. And then to balance it out, when I’m not at work, I try not to work at all.”
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