Joe Locke was just 16 when he went from the Isle of Man to London for an open audition for a new Netflix show called Heartstopper. That was four years ago and, owing to Covid, his mum couldn’t go with him. But the young actor wasn’t intimidated. “I’ve always been quite an independent person,” he says now, over lunch. Locke didn’t freak out as he got through the audition process, because how could anybody have foreseen how big that show was going to get? Also, “I was so unattached to the world of TV, there was nothing that was real life to me. Maybe that helped with the nerves. If I hadn’t got Heartstopper, it wouldn’t have changed anything in my life. It would have just been a cool story, a thing I nearly got.”
In fact, he landed the lead role, and, a month after Heartstopper came out in April 2022, it became the fifth most watched Netflix show (in English) in the world. Locke was … “Grateful?” he says, with a little upwards quizzical inflection. I take his point: the coming-of-age, coming-out drama got so big, and was heralded as so delightful, that it’s hard to imagine anything but that fate (or the universe, or whatever) was behind it.
