Hearstopper Forever: Kit Connor, Joe Locke on Film and Series’ Legacy

It’s week six of Heartstopper Forever’s seven-week shoot, and the 75-degree weather is only slightly unbearable to the U.K. crew and extras huddled on set under canopies or milling about the yard outside of a home. From the outside, a room with floor-to-ceiling bow windows is shrouded in rainbow tinsel. Inside, a lively party plays out — a cacophony of voices, skin, shimmer, bottles, joy and hormones on repeat. 

The house is at the Windsor Road-edge of the historic Bray Studios, tucked between the River Thames and a section of the A308 motorway, in the hamlet of Water Oakley. Their own chapter of U.K. film history, the grounds are the former base for Hammer Film Productions, and a home to everything from Dr. Who special effects filming to rehearsal facilities for music giants like Pink Floyd.

Now, seven soundstages and nearly as many offices and workshops serve as a key site for TV hits, in this case, the final chapter of Netflix‘s LGBTQIA+ YA hit Heartstopper.

Outside, the celebratory scene replays, almost bittersweet, as the voice of director Wash Westmoreland commands the cameras and his ensemble, now thoroughly in young adulthood, from an invisible space across the room. Again and again, Joe Locke’s Charlie, the fictional Truham Grammar School’s newly minted head boy, receives a warm and rousing show of love with the help of his boyfriend, Nick Nelson (Kit Connor).

Now, a year and a day after that moment on set, the movie Heartstopper Forever releases, marking the end of an era. The two-hour feature is the final chapter in Netflix’s adaptation of Alice Oseman’s popular webcomic and graphic novel that ran for three seasons.

The highly anticipated swan song is both a figurative and literal coming-of-age for its cast and creator, Oseman, who began writing and drawing the graphic novel in 2016, two years after securing a six-figure publishing deal when they were just 17. Following the debut of their webcomic and a successful 2018 Kickstarter campaign resulting in the graphic novel treatment, in 2022 Netflix released its adaptation of Oseman’s popular story about gay teen Charlie Spring as he navigates school, friendships, mental health and coming out amid a burgeoning romance with idyllic boyfriend Nick Nelson. 

“For me, it has been nearly 10 years. It’s basically been my 20s,” Oseman told The Hollywood Reporter last July in an office at Bray Studios, set just 26 miles outside central London. “I can see in the story that the way I interact with the world and the ideas and the themes that I find interesting have shifted and developed in that time.”

Executive producer Patrick Walters added, “It’s the first show that I’d produced, the first show that [Oseman] had written and when we were stepping onto set, we were doing it in those roles for the first time with actors who’d never led a show before in Kit and Joe. It mirrored a lot of our personal experiences, and we didn’t really know what we were doing. We felt our way through. Now we’re on the set for the final time, and we really know what we want. We operate, communicate and do things in a more experienced way.”

Before the film, Heartstopper the series spent multiple weeks in Netflix’s Top 10 across three seasons, with its eight-episode debut alone garnering upward of 53.5 million hours viewed — all with a young, first-time showrunner at the helm. “My entire career until this TV show-slash-film, I worked by myself, and suddenly I’m working with hundreds of people,” Oseman told reporters last year. “It’s required me to learn how to trust other people with something that I care so much about.”

Heartstopper Forever ties up several threads among Nick, Charlie and their small ensemble of friends, setting them up for the next chapter of their lives. “We spent three seasons with these characters, and have seen them through the highs and lows of growing up,” Connor tells THR in a Zoom interview, weeks ahead of the film’s July 17 release. “They’re at a point now where it’s these final decisions and resolutions that need to be made.” 

On the heels of predecessors like Skins, Misfits and My Mad Fat Diary, and alongside contemporaries such as Chewing Gum, Ackley Bridge and Sex Education, Heartstopper has, over the past four years, upended British young adult television. On top of featuring a predominantly LGBTQIA-led cast, it’s been a magnet for leading British talent like Olivia Colman, Jonathan Bailey and Hayley Atwell, with Oseman telling THR they’ve been “incredibly grateful that such talented and in-demand actors have wanted to be a part of it, and that their involvement has brought even more viewers to our little queer story.”

The Netflix series has also been consistently age-appropriate and “like the least British show you could make with its honestness and willingness to articulate itself in a real, sincere and heartfelt way,” says Connor. “As a British man, I’m not saying that Brits are incapable of doing that, but especially when you watch those shows that are quite tongue-in-cheek and very dry, sarcastic and a bit nihilistic at times, it is sort of the anti-British show. Yet a lot of Americans I speak to about Heartstopper say that it feels like this incredibly English thing. So it’s quite funny that it’s maybe changed the perception of what Brits are like.”

Since its arrival, Heartstopper’s tonal approach to LGBTQIA-centric YA romantic storytelling has faced various criticisms for its earnestness and arguably overly aspirational take on growing up queer. For Oseman, Heartstopper did begin “very fairy-tale and a little bit idealistic in a beautiful way” — a byproduct of their own age and experiences when they began writing. But they “never approached it like I’m going to write a wholesome, adorable show, because that’s different to everyone. What we’ve seen is that people do enjoy these very earnest, sincere, joyful shows, and maybe that’s something we haven’t seen a lot of.”

Jenny Walser, who plays Nick’s sister, Tori, adds about the story’s final chapter, “Everyone knows the world is a pretty scary place, especially if you’re also trying to contend with your own identity and where you sit in it. It’s vital that this didn’t just become the sweet, saccharin, rosy show. It’s lovely to know that the next generations have access. It can be really cathartic to watch and heal your younger self.”

Heartstopper’s fans have been on this journey with them for over half a decade, enough time for younger viewers to be ushered into their own adulthood. That now ends with a streaming film, a pivot from TV that Walters said “was made with many factors” in mind, including the schedules of its rising stars, which were “definitely a part of the decision” to switch formats, according to Oseman. It’s a final onscreen turn for Locke and Connor that offers “a slightly more real, gritty look at romance” through the lens of a longer-term relationship.  

“We felt quite conscious that a lot of the audience who have really loved the show and read the comics beforehand are growing up with it,” Walters said at Bray Studios. “So in this final installment, we wanted to really challenge ourselves to make it mature, make it feel very cinematic and authored in a way that’s slightly distinct from the TV series.”

For the film’s cast, including Locke, Connor, Walser, Yasmin Finney, Will Gao, Kizzy Edgell, Corinna Brown, Rhea Norwood and Tobie Donovan, the experience of making Heartstopper Forever has buoyed the story’s own maturation. “Going from television to cinema is almost like it’s growing up. It’s a really nice way of properly finishing the stories,” Locke tells THR over Zoom. “It meant that we had more time to do it right. You have fewer scenes to shoot in a day, so you can put more attention on making them better.”

Heartstopper Forever will see its ensemble at their most mature amid a sea of life changes, yet it will still capture the fluidity of young adulthood. “Especially with certain media, we have to put ourselves in an aesthetic or a box. We’ve become so confined to trying to find our identity externally, we’ve stopped exploring,” says Norwood, whose character, Imogen, is a friend of Nick’s and gets closer to understanding her own sexuality in the film. “But Imogen has always been experimenting. We’ve seen so many different evolutions of her, and that’s been a really beautiful and hopefully truthful thing to have presented.”

Gao, who plays Tao, Charlie’s friend and boyfriend to Finney’s Elle, told reporters last July on set that the film has found him and his co-stars where “we’ve gone through growing into adulthood and [those] growing pains. We bring the fans through into adulthood,” he said. “I feel really proud that we’ve been able to offer this show for people. Sometimes growing up is difficult and comes with loads of challenges. I would have loved to have [had] this show when I was younger, it would’ve made things a lot clearer.”

For Connor, the growing pains encapsulate a crucial aspect of what it has meant to star in a series that catapulted his and Locke’s profiles overnight. The duo gained millions of followers in the days after season one’s release. “As a young actor, you experience these monumental shifts in how you view yourself as an artist or professional, and as a person,” he tells THR. Heartstopper was “a very formative experience for us to be able to work out the kind of actors that we want to be. I think we’re still working them out.”

Since the show’s 2022 debut, actors have appeared in major shows and films like Agatha All Along, The Summer I Turned Pretty, Doctor Who, Only Murders in the Building, Sweatpea and Warfare. Several are publicly out in an industry that has historically lent little opportunity or security to anyone openly embracing their identity on and offscreen. 

Heartstopper and its groundbreaking storylines prove that shift in entertainment. But even for two of Hollywood’s next generation of leading men, the landscape remains imperfect. “We both feel very lucky we’ve managed to create careers, as well as from other things that aren’t Heartstopper,” says Locke. “Things I get offered are a lot of twinks, and that is wonderful. I can do that really well. But it’s that double-edged sword of wanting to push past that while also being really grateful I am seen as someone who could do that in the industry.

“As is the way with this industry, whether it’s queer or not, when they see you as one thing, and see you in quite a big way as one thing, they will try to see you that way for the foreseeable [future],” adds Connor. “That was kind of one of the growing pains for us. You don’t want to be defined by one thing.”

The industry may still struggle with seeing the full potential of its queer-led ensemble, but Heartstopper has given its stars diverse material to explore with every new installment, notes Connor. Those layers, which expand in Heartstopper Forever, are illustrative of Oseman’s approach that appreciates both the evolution inherent to queerness and the coming of age. 

“When Darcy started wearing a binder, that was a discussion of: ‘What binder are we buying, how should it fit, what should be comfortable?’” Edgell explained last July. “Darcy in a binder the last season and in this movie has meant that I actually feel more confident in flowier things that I wouldn’t actually wear or be comfortable in beforehand.”

“[Elle and Tao] both went to a boys’ school, Elle transitioned while she was in the boys’ school and then moved to a girls’ school, and the friendship group stayed together through that,” says Finney, who plays a talented artist, Charlie’s friend and Tao’s girlfriend. “My transition when I was growing up, I lost everyone because nobody understood. That in itself is solidarity. When I step into the role, I don’t think I’m trans. This is just me and another version of me that can be an artist and live authentically as myself through the show.”

Due to the show’s popularity, the line between fiction and reality has blurred for its young cast, and not always in such affirming ways. In a modern twist on a common reality of YA and New Adult genres, some fans’ hyper-interest in the show’s stars led to one lead feeling forced to publicly disclose their sexuality amid calls for authentic casting. While the world outside the set may not always respect the boundaries or the mental health of Heartstopper’s actors, the production made it a priority. 

“Patrick [and I] are there on set every single day. You can come to us about anything whenever you want, whatever it is, and we will try and help,” says Oseman, who said the show also brought in Stonewall U.K. in the first season over Zoom. “We’ve tried really hard over the seasons and in the movie to retain as many of the crew as we can. We’ve ended up with a lot of people who know the cast well, so when people are coming onto set, it feels like, ‘These people know me, and I’m safe here.’ That’s what we hope the effect of that was.

“Obviously, you’re on a professional set, so this is the thing: Nothing was sugarcoated,” adds Brown, who portrays Tara, a straight-A student and girlfriend to Darcy. “But you have a therapist that you can speak to, and from the very beginning, we always had that on set in place. Having the space be so safe — because everybody involved, we get on really well — to learn in was also a massive help.”

For half a decade, Heartstopper has delivered needle-moving representation while never losing sight of “showing you real, normal kids going through their lives. Sometimes difficult things happen in those lives, and it’s a nice thing that people can watch it and feel seen or that their experiences are being reflected,” Donovan, who plays Charlie’s friend Isaac and one of two asexual characters on the show, told reporters during the set visit. “The lovely thing is how many doors then open for grandparents or people of differing political views who might watch and go, ‘I thought trans people were really scary, but this is just a normal girl going through the same things at school that everyone goes through.’”

That message is arguably the most powerful aspect of Heartstopper’s legacy, especially for a title that arrived in a seemingly more positive, if not perfect, time in the history of LGBTQIA+ representation and rights — and now ends in a moment when both are being challenged. 

“I was just having a conversation with Patrick about this,” says Oseman over Zoom weeks ahead of the film’s release. “We were asking: Could we have even made Heartstopper the TV show now in the U.K. or the States? Would people have taken a chance on what we saw as a niche story? Would anyone have thought, ‘Hey, that could be an internationally beloved series’? I just don’t know.”

The social and political climate that initially made Oseman’s story feel inauthentic for some has now situated Heartstopper as a different kind of fantasy. In its final chapter, the frequently romantic coming-of-age tale will not shy away from depicting new, more adult shades of physical and emotional intimacy between Nick and Charlie as they and their friends grapple with the anticipation and anxieties of differing ambitions and directions on the cusp of adulthood. It will also directly address movements to strip LGBTQIA+ people of their rights in the U.K. 

“With Elle, what we could do is to have this Pride sequence, which is the characters raising their voices about trans rights and showing their support,” says Oseman, while discussing a parade and a separate speech Elle gives. “What Elle’s feeling is what most trans people are feeling right now — the underlying fear and frustration, because it’s just so constant at the moment. I really like how it turned out, and that we have that space in the film, because it’s so important. We have this opportunity to shine a light on those issues and raise our voices. That’s such an essential part of the ethos of Heartstopper.”

Perhaps even more than when it started, Heartstopper is offering a radically positive and empowering vision of a future for young people whose stories are also being increasingly censored. It’s a political shift that advocates and media watchdogs say has resulted in a widespread disinvestment in LGBTQIA+ storytelling in film and TV, even as titles like Heartstopper and Heartstopper Forever continue to draw audiences. 

Last year, GLAAD’s annual “Where We Are on TV” report found that 41 percent of the 2024-25 season’s nearly 500 identified LGBTQIA+ characters will have disappeared due to cancellations, series finales or character exits. The withdrawal is concerning for Oseman, who has faced increasing censorship efforts around her comic since the show’s release. It’s something the creator agrees could be due to its generally positive reception.

“There were a few cases, particularly in the U.S., where there was a lot of media noise about this book being so explicit for children, which is kind of hilarious given some of the discourse that occurs about Heartstopper,” says Oseman. “Parents or whoever it is making the fuss about these stories are seeing these things get popular, and then doing whatever they can to get those stories away from children. It is really devastating to see that happening, and, as an author, it’s hard to know what to do about it. You can boost the issue, you can talk about it and you can share information about the groups who are actively fighting these bans. But as an individual, what can you do?”

But creators like Oseman — and the ecosystems that build up around shows like Heartstopper (even long after they’re gone) — may already be one answer.

“We always used to say it’s a miracle we’re able to make a show like this today. Particularly in season one, when there weren’t many shows that were this much of a celebration of what it is to be queer and young. The fact is there will always be, and there always has been, an audience for shows like this. But given the state of the world right now, there are people trying to repress those people,” Connor told THR on set between takes of filming a scene. “No matter what happens in the world, there will always be queer people. There will always be people who feel othered by society and like they don’t have a place. I hope that there will always be media to make people feel seen and feel optimistic about what can feel like a very scary world.”

Says Oseman: “We have shows like Heated Rivalry that have blown up massively. We need more queer stories that connect with a wide scope of people. Niche little stories are important as well, but having those stories in the cultural consciousness in a big way is really significant for change and people becoming aware of queerness and queer issues.”

Heartstopper Forever streams on Netflix starting July 17.