We are walking in Borough Market, Kit Connor and I. It’s his favourite area of London, he says, then worries that might sound like a dumb cliche. No, but it’s cool, he continues, speaking aloud these thoughts as he untangles them, even if it is a cliche. This is the bit of London he knows best in that it’s 30 minutes from Croydon, where he lives. Yes, with his mum and dad. He’s still only 19, after all, even if we’ve been watching him on screen since eight. He likes that Borough is near the South Bank, the National Theatre, the British Film Institute. He’s going through a retro phase with films, incidentally; an exploration of the history of the leading men in cinema. He has gone all the way back to Marlon Brando’s early work. Also, James Dean. He was recently photographed for Vogue in Breton stripes invoking the famous Dean shot from the summer of 1955. He likes the brooding, the look. “I’m trying to do it a little bit,” he says. “What do you think?”
He turns to face me. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and battered Carhartt jacket, which he picked up in a vintage shop on a recent trip to New York. Yes, the hair has a touch of 50s, longish and swept back on top, cropped-ish on the sides. Come to think of it, that complexion does, too – milky, lightly freckled, slight ruddiness creeping up the cheeks. Although I can’t imagine him grimacing through the smoke of a dangling cigarette, or driving faster than the speed limit. Or throwing a punch in a state of existential rage. He’s just too sweet. Nor can I imagine hurting his feelings, so I say, “Yes, very brooding rebel.”
The thing is, he doesn’t like the word “heart-throb”, he says, as we continue walking. It’s a bit – he leaves the sentence unfinished. Cringe, is what I guess he means; unsuitable for the modern-day teenager, even one playing the hot lead in a Netflix love story like Heartstopper. The show that made Connor a star is based on the graphic novels by Alice Oseman about two schoolboys navigating their first queer relationship. Connor plays Nick Nelson, who is bisexual; Joe Locke plays Charlie Spring, who is gay. In the first month after release in April 2022, Heartstopper was viewed for a staggering 53 million hours – quickly becoming the fifth most-watched English language Netflix show. The second series, which drops on 3 August, is the most anticipated series this summer.
Not that Connor was a novice to the industry. Unlike Locke, who had no experience, Connor had played the young Elton John in the biopic Rocketman (2019), working alongside Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell and Richard Madden. He appeared with Lily James in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2018) and Ben Whishaw in Little Joe (2019). None of this prepared him for the sudden-impact fame of Heartstopper. Yes, there were the trips to fashion shows in Paris, there were the front row seats and the fuss and flattery. But there was also a shitshow on Twitter, questions about his sexuality, people prying into his love life, and the online stalking of his family members including an older sister, 23, and brother, 22, “who could not care less and are not very interested in my career”.
While Heartstopper is explicitly about queer love, Connor was not asked his orientation when he auditioned – “It would have been so inappropriate to ask a 16-year-old,” he says, but there was something “unspoken” in the “little notice before the casting call, saying: ‘We really want the characters to pass authentically.’
“I was thinking: ‘Well, I feel I can play this role very authentically.’ I knew that I was a queer man, but I didn’t feel I wanted the world to know. Not because I was ashamed, but because it was private.”
All good. Until he was papped holding hands with Maia Reficco, his co-star in the forthcoming film A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow. Heartstopper obsessives wanted to know why he was holding a woman’s hand. He was accused of “queerbaiting” (defined as straight people appropriating queer culture). Some might shrug off online pile-ons like this, but Connor says he “was still very freshly 18. Still newly in the public eye. I wasn’t used to the idea of millions of people watching what I was doing, or having a genuine interest in my private life.” At home one evening, he padded about the house working himself into a stew. Then did something he now describes as “frankly a bit rash”. He typed: “i’m bi. congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. i think some of you missed the point of the show. bye”.
“It was a human instinctual reaction,” he says. “I did it, turned off my light and went to sleep.” On set the following morning, his cast member friends ribbed the hell out of him, he says with a smile, which was “good because it took the sting out of it all”. But he wants to be serious for a second. He wants to add that “the whole point of the show is that [queerness] is not always so stereotyped. There are so many lines in the show where someone goes: ‘Nick Nelson, he’s the straightest guy in the school. He’s the captain of the rugby team so there’s no way [he’s queer].’ Sometimes you just need to give people space.” Season two, which deviates a little from Oseman’s original work, incorporates a lot of Nick’s struggles coming out, “which is important”, he says.
He won’t say who he is or isn’t dating now; he will say that he’d be self-conscious of dating a girl. “I would – annoyingly. I would be more conscious and might be less open about it.” Later, he returns to this subject: “Although now I know that I’m queer, I personally don’t find it a super defining factor. I wouldn’t want to be defined by ‘queer actor’. I want to play all parts. Hopefully, I can do that if my career lasts, if I flourish. Touch wood.”
But first we discuss Heartstopper. The show’s charm is its innocence, and for that reason Connor never thought it would be a hit. “We were surprised anyone was watching it,” he says – “extra shocked” when he learned American audiences loved it, too. He couldn’t imagine savvy modern teenagers buying into the guilelessness: “We don’t have any drugs in this show. We don’t have any sex. We don’t even have vapes. So, yes, it was wild. Especially with 18-year-olds; I thought it might hit a slightly lower age group. I was looking at the TV shows people my age were watching, and it was super-saturated with dark, sexual content, pretty stressful-to-watch shows.” Euphoria, chiefly, but also 13 Reasons Why, Top Boy, and Skins, which is still popular. Even Stranger Things and Sex Education had their moments. Heartstopper provided an antidote, Connor believes: “It was called ‘the anti-Euphoria thing’, which was catchy but true.”
It subverted what was out there in other ways, too, he argues. For the most part, “queer media is pretty dark and depressing and involves a lot of trauma” by focusing on how hard it is to be yourself. “Whereas we wanted to push the other message: that being queer can be beautiful. There will be adversity, sure. There are highs and lows. But the highs can be really high, so it’s worth fighting for.”
Plus, he feels it’s important for young queer people to have a gentle, romantic show. “I don’t think there’s a lack of queer sex in the media, but a lot of the time when queer people are on screen, especially gay and bisexual men, they are heavily sexualised. So, I think there’s something quite nice about the fact that we’re not sexualising it.” Director Euros Lyn deliberately sought the opposite, Connor says, to capture the sentimentality and charm of old Hollywood romances – complete with Charlie standing on tiptoes for a deep, passionate kiss after sports day. Perhaps because of this, audience appeal was surprisingly cross-generational. Sure, he gets teenagers showing him the tattoos they’d had in tribute (most popular: the leaf illustrations that the series lifted from the original graphic novel, but also their characters, “or the little ‘hi’ that Nick and Charlie say to each other, people have that in speech bubbles”). But he’s also stopped by “older queer men in their 30s, but also plenty in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, proud and overjoyed that younger people in the queer community are starting to have these experiences in school.”
Season two of Heartstopper is less chaste in that the issue of arousal is touched on, so to speak. Connor says the love scenes are a lot less awkward. “Firstly, because the relationship between Nick and Charlie shifts, because it’s no longer this angsty, nervous, adorable, ‘like we have a crush on each other’; we are boyfriends now. But also because Joe and I are so much more comfortable doing those scenes with each other. It was a lot easier, and that relaxed vibe comes across. We’ve all improved as actors, too.”
By now we’ve sat down outside Brother Marcus, a Middle Eastern cafe, and are ordering coffee. He orders a latte but declines food, explaining: “I’m not one of those people who can leave the house without breakfast. I’ve been doing, like, eggs on toast over the last few months.” There’s something in his need to be an ordinary 19-year-old that makes him want to impress on me how normal he is. It is the kind of conversation he has with Olivia Colman, who plays his mum in Heartstopper, too. “Because she’s so normal. So emotionally available. The life that I lead is really quite normal and boring. The highlight of my day is often walking to Tesco. I can tell a story about my day-to-day life and she’ll be right there with me and interested.”
But the next minute we’re talking about Taron Egerton, with whom he worked on Rocketman, and whom “I am lucky now to be able to call a friend”, and a recent lunch he had with Sir Elton John, whom “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m lucky enough to be able to call a friend”. That segues into this: “The first time I met him was in Cannes. Which is an insane sentence.”
The combination of growing up on film sets, the pandemic and sudden fame has done something unusual to his development, Connor believes. He says he’s both unusually mature – not least because he was earning money when his older siblings were still receiving pocket money – and socially immature. He’s shy, introverted, rubbish in group settings: “It was like, how do I do this social life thing? I really can’t talk.” One-on-one he’s relaxed, voluble and terribly sincere.
Every few minutes we’ve been stopped by young people – wanting a picture, wanting to tell him how much they love the show. Wanting to say: “Wow, man. Thank you for everything you do.” It was worse when he was at school, he says, blush receding after another selfie. Teens used to congregate at his bus stop, knowing he’d be there, same time every morning. It made the ordinarily self-conscious state of being a teenage boy doubly, triply worse. He felt the scrutiny intensely. Couldn’t roll out of bed, mussed with his shirt tail flapping. Had to check the mirror; check he was presentable. Re-do his hair. Check he looked the way you’re supposed to as the boy whose clips were viewed by billions on TikTok. So, yes, I say, I can see why he’s preoccupied by the description, heart-throb.
As the school’s star rugby player, Nick Nelson needed to have physical presence. The series producers supplied a nutritionist and he recounts how he did push-ups, hundreds a day, in his dressing room. Wardrobe put him in a school uniform a size too small to give a sense of mass – although occasionally he looked as if he would split the seams, Hulk-style. “The character in the comics was 6ft 2 and quite burly. He’s a big boy; an athlete. I saw that and was like: ‘I’d like to put on a little bit [of muscle] – it was exciting. By the time we came to do season two there was definitely a noticeable difference. I’d also grown in height.” Wardrobe took one look at him and ditched the too-fitting uniform. “I think the crossover between seasons one and two is about a night, but in reality, it was a year. When you watch it, Nick has inexplicably bulked up a lot. Maybe you have to suspend disbelief a little.”
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In March, Connor’s personal trainer sent corners of the internet into a sweaty meltdown by posting a picture of him shirtless, moody and let’s just say quite buff, alongside a video of their session. Fans, inevitably, spoke. While most approved – “Kit’s the only person who could make me watch a 25-minute gym video,” said one – others lashed out, calling him “basic” (and “a beast”). Has he felt pressure to conform to the Marvel body type? “It’s not a thirst trap!” he laughs. “I’d just been in the gym, so I’d got a bit of a pump and it’s like the best possible light to take a picture. People say: ‘You don’t really look like that.’ I agree, I don’t. I used to go five days a week and at first it was very much about the aesthetic. Now, I go a couple of days a week for my mental health. I just sit down and kind of blow off some steam and I find it really helpful.”
He lapses into an anecdote about how he was coming back from Milan the day before we meet and the driver who picked him at the airport was clearly using that muscle-bound superhero picture as his steer. “He looks me up and down and I shake his hand and then he’s like: ‘Oh, you’re a pretty decent size.’
“I was like: ‘Sorry?’
“He said: ‘I saw this picture of you and you looked quite big and I thought: Oh that’s probably him just in a film or something. He’s probably not really like that. But you are. You are pretty well built.’”
Now Connor is telling me the story, he isn’t sure if it sounds like a humblebrag and he gets in a tangle saying that both it’s funny that people look him up and see that photo, but also embarrassing: he wouldn’t want that to be the enduring image. But also, it’s not the worst image to have out there; after all, he’s not ashamed of his body or anything. It’s just it wasn’t meant to be a thirst trap; he doesn’t want to be the guy who posts shirtless pictures of himself after working out. His blush deepens as he chases his tail trying to escape the spiralling topic of his physique. Eventually I redirect him with a new question and he looks grateful.
Connor was born in March 2004, youngest of three. His parents, Richard and Caroline, both in advertising, were “definitely not” the kind to drag him to Harry Potter auditions. But he went to the children’s performing arts group Stagecoach to overcome shyness “and get me out of my shell”. This led to a series of small parts – Sky sitcom Chickens; An Adventure in Space and Time; Casualty – before he moved up a step to more recognisable roles – Tom Anderson in Get Santa; Archie Beckles in CBBC’s Rocket’s Island; Petya Rostov in the BBC’s 2016 War & Peace. He appeared on stage at The Old Vic as Alexander in Fanny & Alexander in 2018, although it pissed him off that he had to share the part with two other kids because of UK child labour laws.
He attended the private Whitgift school in Croydon, which he says was a rugby-playing school not unlike the one in the Heartstopper. “If you weren’t getting down and tackling people into the mud, then you probably were not that cool,” he says. He was a “drama boy”, “not unpopular. I had friends.” But when Heartstopper came out, “certain people started talking to me that otherwise wouldn’t have. I had these big, macho rugby boys coming up and saying: ‘I watched Heartstopper and I really liked it. Well done.’ I was like: ‘Wow.’” His fears that there would be a negative reaction to Nick and Charlie kissing in the series were unfounded. “Luckily, I was not bullied.”
An American mother and her 14-year-old stop him. The mother does all the talking: they are from Seattle, her daughter loves the show, she’d really like a photo. The daughter can’t speak she’s so struck by real flesh-and-blood Nick Nelson. She looks both pleased and startled as they pose. “What’s your name?” Connor asks her. She whispers it. “Really good to meet you,” he says, shaking her hand.
He says he loves being mobbed, loves the attention; loves appearing in photoshoots for Vogue, for GQ. A slim teenager with high cheekbones stops. “Oh my God,” he repeats over and over, hand to his mouth. The girls he’s with are giggling. I’m worried he’s going to cry. Connor is super friendly, super appreciative that he’s stopped to say hello, he tells him.
While he was recognised “a bit” in New York – he was there for work, but also went to Pride and vintage shopping to build on his collection of Carhartt jackets – on the whole, he was the observer. He felt like just another teenager, alone, without family, free from the burden of being known. He was astonished by the stars he saw – he doesn’t name them, just says: “People in the street that made me go: ‘Oh-my-God.” He also went to a bar, Via Carota in the West Village, and immersed himself in the pastime of people-watching. “It was one of the first times that I’ve been able to do that. I just sat at the bar, ordered my food and watched. I saw two people on a first date, two people on an anniversary dinner, a person at the bar reading a book. It was fascinating.”
He could riff for hours on why observing life is great. He’s discovered Raymond Carver’s stories, which are amazing in many ways, not least for his dyslexia, being short. “He can write poetically about things that are so mundane.” It’s the film-making he loves, too: observational stuff like Aftersun, and a short he saw the other day called Being Human by Swedish director Klara Bond. “I always refer back to that clip of Sir Ian McKellen doing an Oxford Union address. He said if you can’t afford tickets to the theatre, or if you don’t have a TV, sit on the bus and watch people. Go and see how people live and exist. Start there. And it’ll make you a better actor. And I do think that it does. When people ask what makes a good actor, aside from classical training, I answer, whether it’s true or not: you have to be able to understand people, how they work; how different people would react to different things.”
It’s the lunchtime rush, so I walk him back to Borough station to get the train. He skips enthusiastically and earnestly through a range of subjects from AI to cancel culture (“I mean, maybe this is just me being a hippy, but I think people should just be nice to each other and have an open discussion about when people are saying things that are ignorant and wrong”.) He tells me how much he’d like to do more theatre and also play roles that are against type (“I would lose the weight for a role if I had to”).
And we are at the station. He’s sweet and polite and thanks me a million times for my time. He asks me if I am going to be all right getting the train and getting home and then when I laugh, he realises what he’s said and the colour returns.