Editor’s note: SAG-AFTRA members are currently on strike; as part of the strike, many actors are not promoting their film and TV projects. Interviews for this cover story were completed prior to the strike.
Joe Locke and Kit Connor are finding their place in the world.
When we meet, that place is on set, where the 19-year-old stars of Netflix's British YA romance series Heartstopper are seated in a circle with teenagers playing Truth or Dare. This is director Euros Lyn’s set, built inside the gymnasium of a now defunct school in Slough, west of London, and made to look like a Parisian hotel room — the stage for a pivotal moment in the love story of Locke and Connor's characters, Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson, respectively.
Locke and Connor are also experiencing a pivotal moment, navigating increasingly public lives as their celebrity has grown exponentially in a short time. The first season of Heartstopper, adapted from Alice Oseman’s webcomic, was an instant hit when it premiered in spring 2022, garnering 53 million viewing hours in its first month.
The show is a celebration of queer joy that propelled its cast of mostly unknowns — Connor got his big break as a young Elton John in the Oscar-nominated Rocketman after small roles in Ready Player One and other films — into the spotlight overnight. Locke has since nabbed a Marvel series, and his costar Yasmin Finney will soon star in Doctor Who. Almost all of the cast are teenagers.
At this stage in their lives, every decision can feel monumental, as if it's a lynchpin for all future roads. Locke and Connor, number one and two on the call sheet, are the leaders of their cohort, a group of young people who have bonded amid the chaos of their hit show.
But the big, wide world is very different than the sanctuary of the Heartstopper set, as Locke and Connor have learned. They don’t always get to control the narrative, even when it’s their own. So how do you make peace with coming of age in the public sphere, where things are so often out of your control?
“It kind of feels like it’s coming to an end,” Connor tells Teen Vogue during our set visit. It’s late November, and in just over a week, production will wrap on season two of Heartstopper. “The fact that it’s gonna be over, not really seeing each other every day…” Connor and Locke will head off to film other projects, the blue waves on the mural in the Truham Grammar School for Boys corridor will return to calm, and the cast will get some much-needed rest. Adds Connor, “We’re at that point where I think everyone is just crawling to set every day.”
Still, there's a buoyant vibe here: In between takes, Finney, who plays Elle, appears with open arms for a hug, chatting about the Teen Vogue interview that manifested her Doctor Who casting; newcomer Leila Khan recalls her audition for Sahar (“She was just so charismatic and lovable, instantly,” Oseman says); and Corinna Brown, who plays Tara, makes a heart with her hands for the camera, mouthing, “Hope you have a great day!” Oseman, series creator and writer, and executive producer Patrick Walters sit in the back — they call themselves “the lurkers” — watching coverage on dual monitors.
Locke and Connor bring a fresh assuredness to Charlie and Nick in season two, and convey a sense of security and joy in knowing they get to come back and do it all again for the confirmed third season. Season one followed their classmates-to-lovers story in the context of Charlie’s recovery from being bullied over his sexuality and Nick discovering his bisexuality for the first time. In season two they are flourishing as boyfriends (amid more serious topics), though their breathless “Hi” remains, as if they’re releasing air they didn’t know they were holding in the most YA way possible. Their banter is relaxed. Says Locke, “I think we know the characters so well now that lots of the pressure that may have been there in the first season is sort of eased a little bit.”
When the cameras are off, we see Locke and Connor being among their friends and coworkers, closer to who they might be in real life. Locke’s in line for lunch when a flurry of cast members sashay past, pulling him along, making a beeline for the front. “I’m very happy to stay in the back of the queue. If everyone else is going to the front," Locke says, "I will join in, but I’m not gonna be the one to do it.” He won’t rock the boat, not for something so trivial. But he is quick to stand up for what he believes in when it matters. Later, when asked who grinds his gears, the sheer speed with which he lists UK and US anti-LGBTQ+ lawmakers is enough to make his publicist nervous.
Later that day, Connor greets me for our set interview with a firm handshake, the kind that gets drilled into you as a student. “It felt like we were walking into a boardroom,” he says. With Oseman, Walters, and Netflix representatives present, he says, it's like “a parents' evening” at school. That’s Connor: immediately deductive, an almost stately professional, always reading the room.
In Locke and Connor’s world, social interaction can feel like a revolving door of who’s who, with enough star power to have you questioning who you are amid it all. Connor is learning to navigate the celebrity scene, whether that means sitting front row at Loewe or attending a GQ Men of the Year party with Locke. “I’m awful at it," Connor says. “It still gives me anxiety. It still scares me. I think it always will. Sometimes you meet these people that you respect and admire massively, and it's impossible not to have impostor syndrome.”
When the day’s over, Connor continues, he does his fair share of overanalyzing: “I hope this thing that I said, that probably no one even cares about, didn’t upset this person or didn’t make this person think that I was stupid.”
Locke, a self-professed extroverted introvert, says he can hold his own in social situations, “but I don't gain energy from them. I'd be just as happy having a night in with some friends as I would be going out and going to a club.” Locke stayed at the GQ party past 1 a.m.; he couldn’t bring himself to leave, despite the fact that his alarm would be going off in four hours. He had asked himself, Do I even have fresh underwear? “People assume there's this glamorous lifestyle that attaches to [being in this industry], and I guess there are parts of it that are glamorous, but for the most part, it's not — at all.”
But managing star-powered social interactions is nothing compared with navigating your private life as it becomes public. After season one, Connor’s early dalliance with internet fame was plagued by accusations of queer-baiting, which led him to come out as bisexual on Twitter in October, what he calls a “reflex” and “a very human thing.” But he doesn’t regret it. “Back for a minute. I’m bi,” he wrote. “Congrats for forcing an 18 year old to out himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye.”
For a time, Connor found himself on a parallel journey with his character, but it's not lost on him that while Nick was able to come out to people on his own terms in season one, in real life, Connor felt forced to out himself. “There were definitely points where I was doing season two and saying certain lines, and I thought, This is good, this is how it should be. This is the message that we want to be sending.” In one scene, Nick says to Coach Singh, “None of the guys know about me,” to which she replies, “Well, you don’t owe them that information, okay?” Later in Paris, Elle tells Nick that you don’t always need to understand artwork to enjoy it. It’s true of life too, he says: “You don’t have to understand your feelings completely to know that you like something. You don’t always have to have figured everything out. You can just feel.”
“The show we're doing is really setting blueprints for people to know how to treat these delicate situations, and how to make people feel safe and comfortable,” Connor says. “It felt like certain people didn't quite understand the show and the original message that we were trying to portray in season one," he adds, echoing his tweet. "So if that's the case, then we'll just keep hammering it home in season two and hope that people listen.”
Reflecting back, he says, “It's regrettable what happened to me. I think it was a bit disappointing. The reaction that I got in just trying to be myself and trying to discover myself and putting boundaries up. But despite that, I was still happy.”
Connor is so much more than that tweet, more than the sexuality he never wanted labeled in public, more than the character we see onscreen. “If people can take something positive out of it, if it's benefited anyone, then that's great,” he says. Perhaps now that there is a label for that, the world can find other words to describe him: diligent, reflective, kind.
Says Locke, who had woken up to see Connor’s viral tweet and hugged him on set later that day, “We were all very proud of him, and we're proud of him controlling the narrative…. I’m very proud of him for doing his own thing and what was right for him.”
Locke adds, “There’s an idea that it's part of the job to lose your privacy, that you lose your right to having privacy. That's something I hope the next generation of people in the public eye can change…. I think people are understanding that privacy is a nonnegotiable.”
Locke points out that he’s never actually labeled his sexuality in an interview. “People have assumed and written it," he says, "and I haven't ever corrected anyone because I haven't felt the need to. But I've never specifically stated my sexuality.”
He can’t recall exactly when he knew he was gay, probably because, by age nine, he was already acutely aware of the path he was meant to follow, well before he could register liking someone romantically (“I’ll just marry a woman and have kids because it’s what I’m supposed to do”). But for the record, he says, “I have been openly gay since I was, like, 12.”
Locke is also considerate of the sacrifices made by his friends and family. “It’s a weird guilt I sometimes feel that, by association, their lives are affected by choices in my life,” he says. His mother has made new social media accounts because strangers message her or try to pinpoint her location; someone even called Locke’s grandma. “It's a mutual thing. I need to learn my boundaries and people need to learn their boundaries. Most attention comes from a really good place, and I hope I always appreciate that.”
Still, negative voices can often be the loudest. A person’s image can be distorted online by those who consume information about that person's actions, collecting snapshots of their public life to somehow infer the private — making the kind of assumptions that force an unlabeled actor to out himself before he's ready. When distortions that are bred online can thrive unchecked, it can be dangerous. Fortunately, Locke and Connor have the Heartstopper cast to help keep the negative voices at bay.
“If something's happening online that we're all getting stressed out about, there are several people on set who will just take the piss out of us for it,” Connor says. Humor can neutralize it, take away its power. “Anytime you need any support, you've got that. But it also — in a very nice way, really — normalizes things.”
Case in point: Locke pulls up a recent tweet made by an internet troll, sent to him by a friend as a “good morning message.” Locke forwarded it to Connor with the note, “Saw this and thought it might make your day brighter.”
Says Locke, “If I don't know you, and I don't care about your opinion, you can say what you want about me and that's not gonna upset me. Whereas if someone like Kit was to turn around and tell me I was a horrible person, that would upset me because I care about Kit's opinion. I like Kit. I care about Kit. If he was to say something mean to me, it would upset me.”
“They’re such a bonded gang in the comic and the scripts…. and then you have these actors who are also equally bonded and love each other so much,” says Walters, the show’s executive producer, in a roundtable interview with Teen Vogue and Tudum. A standard day has the cast eating lunch in someone’s dressing room, hanging out in their downtime, before racing to their own rooms for a nap before call time. After the day wraps, they go to their housing complex, file into someone’s apartment, and share a meal that one of them has cooked.
Sometimes, though, a joke or even a hug from a friend doesn’t quite cut it. Locke was shocked by a particular tweet that had over 15,000 likes, just for the sheer number of people who agreed with what it said. “It’s not nice to see,” he says.
“F*ck 'em,” I say.
Locke agrees: “Who are you, spending your time on Twitter talking about people? F*ck 'em.”
When Connor arrives on a Zoom call in late June, seven months after Teen Vogue’s set visit, he's drinking Diet Coke, Sublime Lime flavor. His mum’s obsessed with the drink, though he clarifies that he’s “not sponsored.”
Growing up in the film industry has helped Connor mature in unique ways, but he reminds himself that he's just 19 years old. “I’m still growing, still learning about myself, and still working things out," he says. "I just happen to be doing that on a slightly more open stage.”
It’s easy to look at Connor, a young person who has a wildly successful TV show, and think of him as confident. But he isn’t, he says, at least not how people assume. He isn’t not confident, exactly; rather, he describes himself as “shy,” “insecure,” and “introverted.” He spent his childhood Saturdays in London at a performing arts school because his parents wanted him to open up. “I’m that guy who sits and genuinely stays quiet most of the time, unless I really try and put some effort in.”
He has often looked at other young people with hit TV shows whose lives changed overnight — including his fellow Heartstopper cast members — and been in awe. “They really look like they know what they’re doing,” he says. “They look like they’re at ease and at home here. I am terrified and have no idea what I’m doing.”
When Heartstopper wrapped in early December, Connor wasn’t sure if, beyond season three of the show, he would find more work this year. The words his brain feasts on at night, he says, are “I'm a terrible actor and I’m never gonna work again.” But his future reel paints his career in a much different light: He’ll star opposite Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin actor and Teen Vogue cover star Maia Reficco in the YA rom-com A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow; he will also headline the upcoming horror-mystery One of Us.
Despite the quick shifts in his universe, Connor has thus far managed to keep his head above water and his feet on the ground. He says he does it “just by living in the real world.” He still goes down to the shops, buying food for the week. “I do get recognized a lot in the local shops because I’m just always there,” he says. “When I'm not working, I live a very mundane, boring life.”
The key is to stay aware that he’s “just an actor,” he says, and “not even the most important” person on set. This speaks to a belief system he holds tight as he furthers his craft: “If one person wasn’t there, then it wouldn’t happen.” Connor doesn’t see hierarchy; he finds the notion that an actor or director should be held above others to be “ridiculous.” At the end of the day, he tells himself, “Literally, I just say words and pretend to be people for a living.”
His family is supportive and pragmatic. “They humble me, and they will just take the piss out of everything I do,” he says with a smile. This can reduce worries to insignificance. “They’re very good at just giving me a bit of a reality check.” He latches onto consistency, to the things in his world that have always been and will always be. He enjoys simple pleasures, like cracking open a lime-flavored soda and enjoying a nice afternoon.
Locke — running on four hours sleep though you'd never know it — arrives on Zoom an hour after Connor. He’s been busy settling into his new place in London. It's so new that he’s using a hot spot to make this call. He's also still getting used to doing his own laundry — he’s wearing a Lotso (from Toy Story 3) shirt, the only one that’s clean and still fits. He’s been back in town for two weeks, after spending more than five months in Atlanta shooting Marvel’s Agatha: Coven of Chaos.
Locke, who grew up in Douglas, Isle of Man, says being in Atlanta was “a weird limbo.” He lived alone in a three-bedroom house that far exceeded his needs, but it did give him space to sit with his thoughts and enjoy his own company. And, he adds, “I fell in love with the city, with the people I was with, and the job I was doing.” Unlike Connor, who had done work beyond the Heartstopper set, the Marvel job was Locke’s first experience on a different set since becoming Charlie Spring.
He found a quiet sweet spot between time zones: After 7 p.m. in Atlanta is past midnight in the UK, when the notifications stopped. “It was the first time I had true silence in a long time," he recalls, which gave him the chance to process the past two years of his life. He won’t call it self-discovery (“That sounds really wanky”), but he does acknowledge being on a journey. “I still don’t know who I am. I don’t think anyone really knows who they are. But I think I’m more sure of who I am and who I want to be.”
He says further, “People tend to assume that I am Charlie Spring and I'm a sweet, innocent person. Not that I'm not sweet — I'm a nice person, I hope — but I think people assume that I'm a saint, and therefore I can never act or do things in a way that a normal 19-year-old would. That annoys me sometimes.”
He has evolved. The Locke who appeared on Netflix in April last year, even the Locke with whom I shook hands in November, is not the Locke I see now. That Locke would pride himself on being a “very strong” individual, the one who takes care of others; this Locke knows that he isn’t necessarily that person. He’s aware of his anxieties, struggles that weren’t crystal clear before. Today's Locke prides himself on having learned of his complexities and “not just ignoring it,” like he had before.
On June 9, 2023, Joe Locke and Kit Connor are in New York for their Teen Vogue cover shoot. It’s all so domestic; with a house in the Bronx as the backdrop, they move through a number of looks which Connor later says he enjoyed, especially “the last look where Joe was soaking me with a hose or something; loved that, it was a lot of fun.”
The following day, the pair make an appearance at Washington, D.C. Pride — Locke in the trans flag colors, a tee that says “Trans Rights Are Human Rights”; Connor in a vintage Chippendales shirt. Three weeks later in July, they arrive with their castmates at London Pride, on a float flipping off anti-LGBTQ+ protesters, when Connor wraps his arms around Locke and they rock side-to-side with the rhythm of the music. With two major Pride parades across the U.S. and the U.K. under their belt this year, it recalls Locke’s sentiments from DC Pride: “Pride is a protest, and we can party all we want. Change only happens when people talk.”
Change is most recognizable through intermittence. “We’ve seen them grow so much as human beings and grow in confidence,” Oseman says of the two stars. “Because they have literally grown up, they're at an age where you are changing as a person, figuring out who you are and what you want out of life.”
Connor and Locke aren’t always dreaming in parallel; they converge more than you might think. Connor hopes to be someone “who can entertain and is respected for their craft,” someone “who loves and is loved by the people around them,” who cares for people in his life and is in turn cared for. Similarly, Locke considers those dearest to him to be his priority. “I hope that I make the people around me happy, and that I’m not a drain on them,” he says. “I’m very proud of the things I’ve done and hope I can continue doing them for years. But I think I could be equally happy as long as I'm happy in myself, and with my family and friends and the people I love.”
You’ll find in the way they speak about each other that nobody else can really understand the precise details of their shared journey. “I know that he cares for me and that I can rely on him, and I know that he can rely on me,” says Connor. “It’s really just bonded us together. And I love him.” Says Locke of Connor, “He’s a very, very brave man, in more ways than anyone in the public eye could understand. I love him lots.” Their real-life friendship is Heartstopper’s unsung love story. Two mates navigating their changing world, finding their place, together.
Photo Credits
Photographer: Angalis Field
Photo Assistant: Casey Steffens
Photo Retouching: Digital Area
Stylist: Cornelius Lafayette
Stylist Assistant: Chernisse Butcher
Senior Fashion Editor: Tchesmeni Leonard
Sittings Editor / Associate Fashion Editor: Kat Thomas
Assistant Fashion Editor: Tasha Berkowitz
Groomer: Melissa DeZarate
Production: Hyperion
Art & Design Director: Emily Zirimis
Designer: Liz Coulbourn
Associate Entertainment Director: Eugene Shevertalov
Video Credits
Senior Director, Programming: Mi-Anne Chan
Senior Manager, Creative Development: Logan Tsugita
Director: Jameer Pond
Producer: Madison Coffey
Associate Producer: Rafael Vasquez
Manager, Creative Development, TV Social" Amalie MacGowan
Assoc. Manager, Creative Development, TV: Ali Farooqui
Director of Photography: Christopher Alfonso
Cam Op: Jack Belisle
Gaffer: Niklas Moller
Audio: Rehanna Chandan
PA: Ziyne Abdo
Editorial Credits
Editor in Chief: Versha Sharma
Executive Editor: Dani Kwateng
Features Director: Brittney Mcnamara
Interim Features Director: Alyssa Hardy
Senior Culture Editor: P. Claire Dodson
Entertainment News Editor: Kaitlyn McNab
Copy Editors: Dawn Rebecky, Leslie Lipton
Audience Development Director: Chantal Waldholz
Senior Social Media Manager: Honestine Fraser
Social Media Manager: Jillian Selzer
