Joe Locke and Kit Connor interview: "If you look for people saying bad stuff about you, you’ll find it. It’s terrifying, but so tempting.” (2024)

Connor has flirted with fame for a long time, just never at its current wattage. Born and raised in Croydon, South London, he’s played supporting characters in primetime soaps like Casualty and TV movies, before, in his late teens, graduating into blockbusters. In 2019 he appeared as a young Elton John in Rocketman and in the indie drama Little Joe. In between shoots he attended a well-performing school, where he was, by his own recollection, the “well-behaved and never really too rebellious” one among his friends.

Connor remembers, aged 11, having to choose between playing the son of Rachel Weisz and Colin Firth in a British drama by a BAFTA-winning director, The Mercy, or joining his classmates on a traditional year-end trip to the Isle of Wight. “It was a real, genuine debate in my head,” he says. He chose the film, and feels like he made the right decision. “When you’re younger, these tiny things,” school trips, he means, “seem huge. I’ve lost a lot of my childhood in many ways, [but] I don’t regret it at all.”

Locke’s childhood had different stakes. He grew up gay in Douglas on the Isle of Man, the last place in the British Isles to legalise hom*osexuality in 1992. “I don’t think anyone who reads about where I’m from could fully understand it,” he says, calling it “a classic small English town but on an island you can’t escape.” It was bucolic, “safe and sheltered”. When Connor was on his first TV sets, Locke was still making dens and playing make-believe wizards with his friends. “What was I?” he contemplates, when I ask what he thought of himself growing up. “Loud,” he says, “but really quite self-conscious and anxious.” An effervescent exterior covered the parts of himself he was a little more unsure of.

Like Connor, drama played a part in Locke’s life. The Isle of Man had what he calls “a really strangely high calibre” of amateur theatre and, as one of the few boys interested in it, he was, he says, almost guaranteed the good roles. But it never seemed possible to him as a real-life vocation. “Acting was always my passion,” he says, “but I think I’d resigned myself to the fact it wasn’t going to happen.” Older friends had left to pursue careers in drama in London, “and then they’d not be lucky in the right ways, or not find the right things and then not be able to sustain living [there]. The way that people trying to break into the industry are treated by society is so sh*tty and hard.” So he knuckled down and lined up a different future, planning to go to university, then perhaps law or journalism.

By the time they were both preparing for their GCSEs, Heartstopper had started to bring them together. The show’s casting director, Daniel Edwards, had auditioned Connor before and initially thought of him to play Charlie. But when Connor did his Zoom audition (most of the casting process happened in early 2021, during the pandemic), Edwards recalls that “his maturity was screaming Nick”. Locke responded to an open audition call on social media. “Joe sent us a self-tape from the corner of his bedroom with his posters on the wall,” the show’s director, Euros Lyn, recalls. “He felt so authentically like Charlie: a 15-year-old who would apologise for breathing. There was a quality that Joe had, a humbleness, that spoke of that.”

The pair met face-to-face for the first time at Locke’s final audition in London. “Kit was aware I had no idea what I was doing,” Locke remembers, “and so he made me feel at ease.” Fast forward to today and, after months of filming and public engagements together, both are relaxed and confident. Locke jumps at the opportunity to try his first slot machine, and Connor and I watch on and stand guard, waiting for an attendant to pop up and pull us away from them. While their romance is palpable on-screen, in real life you could call their relationship more of a reliance, leaning in on each other like a two-person human triangle. They have the energy of two deeply trusting and platonic best friends.