Meet Joe Locke, the teen star of Netflix’s Heartstopper: he landed his breakout LGBT drama role without an agent and dreams of being the first gay Disney prince
- Heartstopper, based on the graphic novel by Alice Oseman, released on April 22 – and Locke’s Instagram following ballooned from 1,000 to nearly two million
- Besides HBO’s Euphoria, which addresses more ‘hard-hitting issues’, Locke thinks that ‘loving and positive stories of being queer’ are important too
Fans can’t stop talking about the new Netflix teen LGBTQ+ drama TV series, which is already rated nine out of 10 on IMDB. Based on Alice Oseman’s graphic novel of the same name, Heartstopper is about two boys, Charlie Spring and Nick Nelson, who fall for each other at secondary school while dealing with homophobic abuse.
“It’s a beautiful story of acceptance, love, friendship and happiness. It shows the really nice things about being queer,” Joe Locke, who plays the high-strung, sensitive Charlie, told The Independent.
But just who is the 18-year-old rookie actor who is sending hearts aflutter with his touching performance?
1. His acting dream was just a hobby
Locke grew up with a huge passion for acting and drama. When he was not at school, he spent all his time performing in amateur theatre. He once even asked his mother if he could attend five different acting lessons at once. “She’d say, ‘Joe, I really need you to pick just one or two because you have zero free time!’” he recalled with 1883 Magazine.
However, the son of a schoolteacher mother and newsagent father later looked at acting as a hobby rather than a career. “I’m from the Isle of Man and it’s really hard to break into the industry from there,” he told Behind the Blinds. “I know lots of extremely talented people who have ended up going back and working office jobs because they haven’t been able to get that chance.”