“If I’m, like, just wanting to feel shit about myself,” says Joe Locke, “I’ll search my name on TikTok . There’ll be 100 really nice things, but it’s always the one really mean thing that I remember.” Kit Connor, Locke’s Heartstopper co-star, shakes his head.
“Ignorance is bliss,” says the 20-year-old sagely. “That’s how life is supposed to be lived.” Connor and Locke’s is a strange, 21st century kind of celebrity.
A significant proportion of the population have absolutely no idea who they are. But there is a subsection of people — those who have watched and loved Netflix ’s desperately sweet queer teen drama Heartstopper — to whom they are full-on superstars. If you do search their names on TikTok, you’ll find thousands of fan-made videos: there’s one of the pair of them on a London Pride float — Locke in a pink sleeveless sweater vest, Connor in a white singlet — that has 1.
2 million likes; a clip of someone’s eight-year-old niece swooning over them has half a million likes; a montage of photos of them kissing on the beach (in character) has 375,000; there’s even one analysing Locke’s tan lines that has racked up 20,000. Heartstopper , the show that started all this, premiered on Netflix in April 2022. Based on the graphic novels by Alice Oseman, it follows Charlie (Locke), a shy, slightly nerdy 14-year-old, and his blossoming romance with Nick (Connor), a beefy rugby lad in the year above.
Over the course of three series (t.
