Life is pretty surreal for Bel Priestley. “Three years ago I was a cleaner who had no friends or clue what I was going to do,” she says while sitting on a white Ligne Roset sofa in the office of her new management company. Now, the 20-year-old is about to make her acting debut in one of the biggest Netflix shows from last year, a feat which her 1.2 million TikTok followers (which she accumulated in just over a year) are feverishly awaiting.
Created by Alice Oseman after originally starting life as a Tumblr webcomic, Heartstopper was one of Netflix’s 2022 breakout hits. Fans spent over 53 million hours watching the series within its first three weeks, giving it a perfect 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But if you somehow haven’t watched the uplifting LGBTQ+ coming-of-age drama, then you’ll almost definitely recognise the cast members — Yasmin Finney, Kit Connor and Joe Locke — from the covers of Vogue, GQ and ES magazine. Simply put, Priestley’s starring role in the upcoming second series is about to change her life immeasurably.
Priestley plays Naomi, an original character written especially for the TV adaptation. “She is what I wish I was in school – confident, outspoken,” Priestley says of Naomi, who attends art school with Yasmin’s character, Elle Argent. “I was such an awkward kid. I had a hard time so I kept to myself.”
When she was 13, Priestley began transitioning. At the time, she was at school in a small town near Milton Keynes. “Being trans wasn’t talked about online a lot. In the UK, there were only really people like Munroe [Bergdorf]. She was the one who made me realise I was trans, I even told my parents to watch her documentary [What Makes a Woman] to see how I felt.”
Despite being bullied, Priestley didn’t stop advocating for herself. She began posting YouTube makeup tutorials (“I got rinsed by the kids at school for it”), before joining TikTok where she gradually built a (comparatively smaller) following of 50,000 users. Yet, from Christmas 2019 onwards she decided to take it more seriously while also candidly sharing her transition journey — and that’s where things really took off. “I grew 400,000 followers in a month,” she says of her account, where she shares everything from receiving hormones for the first time to her dating horror stories. “By the middle of 2021, I had hit a million followers. I went to Wembley soon after, and my friend was like ‘ten times the amount of people here are following you’.”
Still, acting has always been her dream, one that she’s fostered through multiple school plays and drama classes (where she got an A). Priestley was even considering acting school at one point, but was discouraged by the lack of trans roles available. “I mean — at the time, there was none. Yas in Heartstopper was the first time really, especially from the UK.”
Although on-screen queer representation has improved over the last few years, thanks to mainstream shows such as Sex Education, Queer Eye and Ru Paul’s Drag Race, this is only after a long stint of one-dimensional LGBTQ+ stories portrayed by straight, cis actors. While shows such as Pose, Orange Is The New Black and Euphoria have centred trans actors on prime-time shows, this has predominantly been in America — not the UK.
It’s why Heartstopper was always on Priestley’s periphery. “At my old management, when I first signed, they asked what my big goal was and Heartstopper had just come out. I must have subconsciously manifested it, but I thought it would be in five years’ time.”
Soon after putting this wish out into the ether, one of the show’s casting directors got in touch with her management about the role — but Priestley was hesitant to get her hopes up. “I think now, it’s such a hard thing to transition from social media to acting. People don’t take TikTok very seriously, so I do have this pressure to be ten times better to make a point,” she says. But, if the casting process is anything to go by, she’s already on the way to proving her talents — and then some. She landed the role after just one self-tape. No callbacks, no chemistry reads. And within three weeks of auditioning, she was on the set with the rest of the cast.
Of course, she couldn’t tell anyone at first, instead skipping out on plans by pretending that she was on camping holidays or visiting her aunty. “After it got announced I went into school the next day and the people who were horrible to me asked to get a picture with me. I was like, ‘No’.”
With only days until her big debut, Priestley has been living in a twilight period. Although she already had a profile — enough to be swarmed at London’s Pride parade last month (“I was like, ‘Really, for me?’”) — an internationally acclaimed Netflix show will significantly raise her platform. Helpfully, she’s been friends with the series lead Yasmin Finney (who also didn’t come from a professional acting background) for years.
“There’s a really nice scene where we started talking about being trans and relating to each other,” says Priestley. “We know each other from back in the day, and these are conversations we’ve been having just the two of us for years. To film that scene together knowing it’s the first time in the UK where two trans girls have come together was so emotional. It was such a full circle moment.”
Already a role model for millions on TikTok, Priestley is ready to take her influence to the global stage — as well as closer to home. “My media teacher that taught me in sixth form is teaching Heartstopper as a subject this year, so she’s going to be teaching about me in lessons.”
Heartstopper will be available to stream on Netflix on August 3, 2023.
