‘Not all gay sex is as hypersexual as on TV’

“If I just want to feel bad about myself,” says Joe Locke, “I search my name on TikTok. There will be a hundred really nice things, but it’s always the only really mean thing I remember.”

Kit Connor, Locke’s Heart stopper co-star shakes his head. “Ignorance is bliss,” says the twenty-year-old sage. “That’s how life should be lived.”

Connor and Locke’s is a strange 21st century celebrity. A significant portion of the population has absolutely no idea who they are. But there is a subset of people: those who watched and enjoyed Netflix’s desperately sweet, strange teen drama Heart stopper– for whom they are real superstars. If you search their names on TikTok, you’ll find thousands of fan-made videos: There’s one of them on a London Pride float – Locke in a pink sleeveless jumper vest, Connor in a white singlet – which has 1.2. million likes; a clip of someone’s eight-year-old niece swooning over them has half a million likes; a montage of photos of them kissing on the beach (in character) has 375,000; there is even one that analyzes Locke’s brown lines and found 20,000.

Heart stopper the show that started this all premiered on Netflix in April 2022. Based on the graphic novels by Alice Oseman, it follows Charlie (Locke), a shy, slightly nerdy 14-year-old, and his blossoming romance with Nick (Connor), a burly rugby kid in the year above. Over the course of three series (the third comes out tomorrow) we see Nick struggle with his feelings for Charlie (he googles “Am I gay?”, quizzes and cries – a rite of passage as old as the internet), and then gradually of coming to terms with their mutual attraction as the pair embark on a relationship that is just, well, sweet. “It’s the old Hollywood romance that the queer community never really got,” Connor says.

And if it’s all filtered through a more hopeful, healthy, and heartwarming lens than is strictly realistic—these teens are very emotionally articulate—then maybe that’s the point. It is for young people Heart stopper offers an ambitious blueprint for queerness; for older generations, it’s a deeply cathartic alternate reality to our own teenage years. “It’s not entirely representative of the times,” Connor admits, “but it’s hopefully a sign of the future.”

Within the first month of the release of series one, Heart stopperhad become the fifth most-watched English-language show on Netflix – and Locke and Connor had built a passionate fan base, with millions of followers on social media. The fame was strange, especially as they were still doing their A-levels. “I found it very embarrassing at school because people would make fun of you,” says Locke, who grew up on the Isle of Man. “Not in a mean way,” he adds, somewhat unconvincingly, “but in a ‘there’s that alien, that’s the weird thing…’ I don’t know. It was strange. And I never liked being recognized at school.”

“It’s quite strange, isn’t it?” says Connor, who attended an all-boys school in London that he previously described as ‘not hugely inclusive’. “One person I went to school with for seven years asked me for an autograph. I thought, ‘We were in math together?! Go get the yearbook photo.” They never talked to me that much either.”

If the way they were treated by their classmates was uncomfortable, the way they were treated outside of school was completely overwhelming. Of course it is mainly admiration, but admiration comes with a bit of strangeness. “I was at the airport and this guy pushed a picture in front of me and said, ‘Can you sign this?’ And it was just a shirtless picture of me. You know, the…” Locke nods. “I know that one.” (Connor started training last year, in part because fans suggested he wasn’t muscular enough to play Nick.) “Yeah. I was like, ‘No, I’m not going to draw my abs.'”

All this attention is hard to deal with at any age, let alone when you’re a teenager and still “not quite ready,” as Connor puts it. “You’re not ready to come out of the oven yet.”

Not ready to come out completely. If Heart stopper Connor’s popularity grew, as did fan speculation about Connor’s sexuality. The speculation ranged from curious to downright aggressive; some “accused” him of being straight and profiting from a queer project, dodging the issue of his sexuality to queerbait fans. People even started contacting his friends demanding an answer. He quit Twitter. Then he logged in again. “Let’s go back,” he wrote in October 2022. “I’m bi. Congratulations on forcing an 18 year old to abandon himself. I think some of you missed the point of the show. Bye.”

These days, Connor is understandably reluctant to talk about that. “I’ve talked about that period endlessly, and my position on it hasn’t really changed,” he says. ‘It’s just: I like my privacy. I enjoy being able to live my life and not have to think about certain things that I really shouldn’t think about.”

The number of queer role models is much higher than it was a decade ago – when I ask Locke and Connor what their own role models are. Heart stopper was, they can’t limit it because “we were more spoiled than previous generations” – but there still seems to be a particularly intense form of pressure put on queer celebrities, which in turn has led to more strongly expressed boundaries (see the Chappell Roan’s angry rant last month: ‘I don’t want what you think you’re entitled to when you see a celebrity. I don’t care if you think it’s selfish for me to say no for a photo, for your time or for a hug. That’s not normal.”

Locke and Connor’s boundaries, albeit less expletive-laden, are just as firm. “There’s only so much I can be a role model because I don’t want to share my whole life story,” Connor says. “I’ve always stayed out of that kind of thing,” says Locke, who came out as gay to his mother at 12 and to his friends at 15. “In my private life I have never answered questions about anything. and I never will.”

We’re in a conference room deep in the heart of Netflix’s London headquarters. Locke, wearing a white shirt with embroidered flowers up to the top button, is the more reserved of the two. Softly spoken, his shoulders a little tense, he likes to let his sharper opponent take the lead in the conversation. , but when he intervenes, he is articulate and candid. However, he seems most comfortable when bickering with Connor, such as when he admits that he recently bought a pair of Apple Goggles that he has only used twice. “Damn Joe, that’s so stupid,” Connor says. “What are they for?!” “I couldn’t tell you that,” Locke grins. “I really don’t like that. That will rot your brain.” Locke rolls his eyes. “Okay, old man.”

Connor, despite being the younger of the two by a few months, seems to treat Locke a bit like a younger brother. But that hasn’t stopped some fans from treating the couple as if they were actually Charlie and Nick, and therefore actually in a relationship. When Connor recently posted about his starring role in Romeo & Julietalongside Rachel Zegler on Broadway, the comments section was flooded with comments along the lines of, “What would Charlie say?”

“Yes, I have to say I don’t like that,” Connor says. “I’m an actor above Nick Nelson’s actor. I guess those fans are less fans of myself (than) of the characters. That’s fair, but I wish I could be seen as an actor. “I love Nick Nelson, but I wouldn’t like to be labeled as him for the rest of my life.”

“It’s the Harry Potter effect where Daniel Radcliffe spends the rest of his career trying to distance himself from Harry Potter,” says Locke. “I’m definitely starting to understand the ‘Lindsay Lohan and Miley Cyrus breaking away from Disney’ thing since then Heart stopperhas come out. On a very low level, but I get it now.” It should help that Locke is now starring in the Marvel TV series Agatha all the timea spin-off from WandaVision as the elusive goth Teen – but it’s not over yet when we meet, and he’s not allowed to talk about it.

For now there is more Heart stopper discuss. The third series is considerably less PG. The characters drink alcohol. Some of them have sex. The words, “You’re so damn hot,” are spoken. It’s a little different to the chaste milkshake dates of series one and two. Locke knows it might come as a shock to people, but “just because it’s a heartwarming show,” he says, “doesn’t mean the characters can’t be fully functioning teenagers.” It also reflects the trajectory of the graphic novels, the most recent of which (without anything too graphic, of course) depicted Charlie and Nick having sex.

“In queer media, gay sex can often just be super hypersexual,” says Connor, “which is true in a lot of ways, but not all gay sex is exactly that, you know? So it’s important that we continue to explore these topics in the Heart stopper But we’re also at a point now where we’ve grown up a bit since season one. We don’t look so teenage. It would have been a little weird to see us thinking, ‘Ooh, we’re holding hands!’ It would have been… a bit shocking.”

In the latest series it also gets darker. First, Charlie’s eating disorder reaches a crisis point. It’s a storyline that – like everything Heart stopperstorylines, such as bullying, self-harm or transphobia – are handled sensitively and movingly, even if it never quite plumbs the depths that these kinds of things can reach. “I wanted to do the storyline straight and authentically and not upset anyone,” says Locke, “while also remembering that I am just an actor and just one cog in the machine of making sure the story was done correctly.”

There are also deeper explorations of identity. One character emerges as non-binary, the other as asexual. In one particularly disturbing scene, Charlie’s girlfriend Elle, who is transgender, is invited on local radio to talk about her art, but is inundated with questions about whether transgender people should be allowed in women’s spaces.

“Our show is not political,” Locke says. “It never was and it was never intended. But you can’t talk about these things without showing the existing problems in the system.” What does he think of a journalist calling the show “more than a little didactic” – a similar complaint to the one leveled at its Netflix stablemate Sex education? He brushes. “It’s probably a very strong use of the word to try to create a conversation where there wasn’t a conversation. It’s just a fun show.”

“There are messages behind it,” Connor adds, “but it’s just a love story like any other.” Then Locke, still a little annoyed, adds, “It’s just become didactic in the way the world is becoming more polarized and everything is becoming more political – but that was never the goal. It’s just a show about loving relationships.” He shrugs. “If people want to make it political, that’s their business.”

‘Heartstopper’ series three is on Netflix tomorrow