Lucas Aurelio takes off his baseball cap, unleashing the mess of dark, curly locks that Bridgerton viewers fell for last year. The piercing gaze that contributes to his screen-worthy allure is softer than his headshots would have you believe. It’s more contemplative as we sit on the patio of Olde English Pub in Albany, and he speaks with solemn reflection. “I’m 30…” he muses, without a trace of irony.
One can hardly blame the Capital Region native for feeling a bit lived-in—he’s had a lot of lives. His Spanish mother afforded him dual citizenship, and he grew up spending his summers in Madrid. After graduating from Albany High School, he was a soccer star at Russell Sage College, and in 2018 earned a degree in musical theater. “My expectation finishing Sage was to go to New York City,” he says. “I genuinely thought, as a musical theater major who had never been around screens, that I’d stand in line for an open call for Hamilton for hours and hours, and wait to get seen. That’s what I thought my career was going to look like post-college.”
But after a trip to the UK, his plans changed. With Brexit poised to end the right of free movement, he figured he’d try out living in London while he still could. He moved into a warehouse apartment with 11 other roommates (he still lives there today), and got as close to actors and filmmakers as possible by securing a job as a bellboy at the Chiltern Firehouse, a luxury hotel frequented by celebrities. Unfortunately, his first famous guest, an actor who shall remain nameless here, broke the silver screen spell. “The dude sucked,” Aurelio says. “He used me as an ornament for his method acting. It was a really rude awakening.”
But subsequent run-ins with A-listers like Robert De Niro, Bradley Cooper, and Dua Lipa renewed his faith in the profession, and during the COVID pandemic he started taking classes and workshops online “to remind myself I was an actor.” It gave him the confidence to approach these icons, and to put himself out there. “When I was meeting the people that I knew I wanted to work with, I was just telling them, ‘I know you; I know your work; you’re great,’” he says. One night, he caught a sleepy J.J. Abrams waiting for the elevator to his room and chatted him up, eventually confessing that he’d seen the casting call for his latest show and had submitted. Abrams warmly thanked him and promised to bring him up to his casting director. The next day, Aurelio’s agent was notified that Abrams had kept his word, but ultimately decided he was too young for the role.
Years later, with Witcher, Bridgerton, and Noah Baumbach credits under his belt, Aurelio got cast in a J.J. Abrams film—The Great Beyond, due out this November. The role has only one line, but he doesn’t take it for granted. “At the end of it he came up to me and asked, ‘How long did it take for us together?’” Aurelio says of Abrams. “I said, ‘Four years.’ And he said, ‘It will happen again.’” Despite that validation, Aurelio knows he’s got so much more to give. “That’s not a performance,” he says of the role. “That’s an opportunity.”
His role as Paul Suarez in Season 3 of Bridgerton, on the other hand, really opened his eyes to the potential impact an actor could have. “I felt really beloved,” he says. “The fan base is really incredible. They’re really supportive—those that resonated with my character. I love what Bridgerton gave me.”
Since then, Aurelio’s leveraged his success in Bridgerton to secure minor roles in other hit streaming shows such as Mobland (“Helen Mirren tells me to shut up”), Your Friends and Neighbors (“I get to play a Brooklyn hipster; I’ve never lived in Brooklyn”), and the upcoming season of House of the Dragon, which has perhaps the most secretive set he’s ever been on. “They collected the physical call sheets at the end of the day, and the ones they sent via email are completely password protected,” he says. Aurelio’s reasonably tight-lipped on further details. “My character is in the books, though,” he offers up with a proud smile.
And despite landing one of the biggest franchises in television history, Aurelio wants more. “I want to be a lead,” he says. “In order to be recognized as an accomplished actor, you have to give a performance. I want to be able to make something that speaks to people.” Last summer, he got the opportunity to do just that, mere minutes from his hometown. He returned to the Capital Region to star in writer/director Miranda Hart’s Off to The Races. Hart and Aurelio have been friends since high school, and after Bridgerton put him on the map, she reached out about a feature film based around the Saratoga horseracing season. “I read the script and it was really out there—really different,” he says. “It’s like Gone with the Wind, but modernized. And it was really funny; I really bought into it.”
So, in the summer of 2025, Aurelio returned home to star as Hudson, the romantic foil to the appropriately transatlantic-accented lead Babs, played by Hart herself. They worked all over the region, incorporating iconic local locations like the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany and Siro’s in Saratoga. “Shooting at Miranda’s family home, then walking down to Caroline Street and having a night out with friends…It was such a beautiful experience.”
The chance to reconnect with his hometown and the promise of a real performance weren’t the only things that motivated him to come on board, though. Following the lead of other leading men, Aurelio asked for a producer credit on the film as a way to build more opportunities for himself as an artist. “That’s ultimately the end goal,” he says. “To be able to do what Glenn Powell’s doing, to do what Brad Pitt’s doing—any sort of leverage as an actor to be able to tell the stories I want to tell.” It’s not uncommon for actors to turn into producers or writers, he says. “Whether they want to admit it or not, it’s most actors’ dream to perform their own writing. But that’s a really scary thing. That’s when it becomes really exposing.” But, as Bridgerton fans know, Aurelio has never shied away from that.
Now, Aurelio is still out there looking for work—and for more excuses to come back home. “I can’t believe I haven’t gotten The Gilded Age yet,” he says, incredulously, of the HBO series that’s filmed largely in Troy. “Sexualized period piece? I mean, that is me!” But despite the feelings of existential dread associated with leaving his twenties, he does acknowledge that he knows he’s got a lot more ahead of him. “We’re so concerned with where we are now, we forget that we’re going to be doing this for 10, 20, 30 years,” he says. “We feel like time is flying by, but we’ll be sat here at 60 having the same conversation. We have to enjoy it for what it is. And I’m enjoying every minute of it.”
