Joe Locke is proud of himself — but with a caveat. He flirts with the concept. He’s proud of his career thus far. He’s proud of the work he’s done; the part he’s played as Charlie Spring in Heartstopper, breathing life into a world that matters to people, helping them, hopefully changing opinions. “I’m the most proud of myself I have ever been in my life,” Locke tells Teen Vogue over Zoom in late June. But he won’t claim to be fully, irrevocably proud. It’s the Britishness in him.
The 19-year-old actor is this month’s Teen Vogue cover star alongside Kit Connor, Locke’s co-star in Heartstopper, the British YA romance series based on Alice Oseman’s webcomics, which released its sophomore season on August 3.
During his fitting at Vogue House for his Teen Vogue cover shoot, Locke saw Anna Wintour going about her day. “I felt like I was in a movie… I loved every second of it. I didn’t know if I should go say hi.” (At a GQ party last November, Locke arrived later than Wintour — a power move, he quips. “But don’t print that because I don’t want her to not like me, and I want to go to the Met Gala one day,” Locke says, half-joking.)
The day Locke nabbed the Heartstopper role, at merely 17, he mentally left high school. He’d been itching to leave that world behind and experience what it’s like to be a grownup. It made things difficult after filming season 1, when he found himself back at school to complete his studies. “I’d been taken out of this kid world and put in this adult world in which I was treated like an adult. [I] was given a level of respect, in a real job, being paid an adult salary.”
The whiplash was extreme; Locke got into trouble for wearing the wrong colored jumper and had to ask permission to use the restroom again, things that seem insignificant when you’re at the top of a call sheet. “I think it was very important for me to go back to school,” he says. “It taught me a lot of humility and kept my ego in check at the most perfect time.”
Speaking of school, Locke tells a funny little story about his childhood in the classroom, when he got into trouble for accidentally drawing vaginas. The task was to draw flowers, but his flower ended up looking like a vagina — or so he was told by his teacher. He told her, “Miss, I have no idea what a vagina looks like.” He laughs now, because it happened more than once.
Working on Marvel’s Agatha: Coven of Chaos in Atlanta was the second most incredible experience of Locke’s life (“I don’t think anything could ever beat the experience of Heartstopper, especially season one and the release and the bonds created there”), having spent six months with “the most incredible women, surrounded by the most talented, genius people,” he says. The upcoming Disney+ series stars Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza, Debra Jo Rupp, and Patti LuPone, “women who have made names for themselves and are real forces for what they believe in.” Taking the job, which he found “very full on, very physical, very emotional,” was his way of proving to himself that his acting career doesn’t start and end with Heartstopper.
He offers endless praise for Agatha showrunner Jac Schaeffer. Locke adds that Schaeffer directed a few episodes of the forthcoming series, something she hadn’t done on Wandavision. “There’s something so incredible about working with the person who knows the story better than anyone else,” Locke says. It’s Oseman’s involvement in Heartstopper that has made the comic-to-screen adaptation such a roaring success, and it’s Schaeffer’s multi-disciplined hand steering the Agatha ship that Locke found incredible. “She knows these characters and this story more than anyone else in the whole world, so who better to direct the episode than the person who created it?”
In a similar way, he’s gotten better at knowing himself; what he likes about himself, what he wants. “The thing about myself that I like the most is that I think I’ve got a very clear sense of what I believe is right and wrong,” Locke says. Although it might scare his publicist, he is not afraid to speak up “if I think what I believe is right for the world.”
His sense of humor, even as observed in our interview, is fierce and unyielding; dry, self-deprecating, though not everyone understands it. “When I was in America,” says Locke, “people thought I was being serious and I actually quite enjoyed that because I found it more fun.”
Ahead of returning to Slough to shoot the third season of Heartstopper, Locke finally has the time to indulge his hobbies. “I want to read more, I want to listen to more music, I want to look after myself better,” he says.
At one point in our interview, I tell Locke to pretend he’s on the main stage of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I hold up a notepad with my drawing of his younger self and ask him what he would say to little Joe Locke — in any other circumstance, one might use childhood photos, but that seems unbecoming considering his baby pictures were leaked from his mother’s Facebook. (Locke agrees it’s a good drawing of him. “You just missed the big ears.”)
To little Locke, he says: “Do not pluck your own monobrow. Do not do it. Let someone else do it. It’s not gonna end well. I would say have fun. Don’t stress about the future. You’ve got it pretty good. Be less dramatic sometimes and shut your mouth in situations. But other than that, carry on. I don’t want you to do anything different because I don’t want you to change the version of me that you become.”
Heartstopper is now streaming on Netflix.
