Heartstopper’s Joe Locke and Kit Connor Are Making Out Just Fine

Alex Garland is codirecting Warfare with Ray Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL who was the military advisor on Garland’s artillery-heavy Civil War; this is about all that’s been revealed about the movie, beyond the fact that the Iraq War SEAL team at its center is played by a starting lineup of prestige heartthrobs that also includes Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, and Noah Centineo. Indeed, the real first look the public got of Warfare was a smattering of Instagram candids that showed the cast—Connor among them—rocking hardo buzz cuts and smoking cigs during production.

On the Warfare set, Gandolfini says, “Kit was always the one to hype everyone up, get people excited.” While they filmed in a small English town called Tring, Gandolfini, Connor, and their castmate Cosmo Jarvis all lived on the same floor, and each night, they’d convene for a group hug—a gesture of nontoxic masculinity so mushy that it wouldn’t feel out of place on Heartstopper. On the one evening when Jarvis hit the hay early, Connor knocked on his door to make sure he didn’t forget about the hug. “[Connor] just has such a sort of beautiful, sensitive but strong, masculine sort of presence about him,” says Gandolfini.

(This seems to be the general tenor of the Warfare camaraderie, according to Gandolfini. “It was an unbelievable bond that I certainly have never had with a group of 16 men,” he explains. “Noah Centineo says we fell in love with each other.”)

Garland first learned of Connor in what he describes as “classic middle-aged-guy” fashion: the filmmaker’s daughter is a Heartstopper fan, and when Garland watched the show himself, he saw an actor who seemed not only charming but talented.

“The thing about Kit is that there’s something disarming about him,” Garland says. “In acting terms, there’s real craft and that craft is not like a sort of wide-eyed ingénue. That is someone who’s working extremely hard at what they’re doing.” And in Connor’s Warfare role, which Garland says required a great deal of physical and psychological endurance, the filmmaker observed that “as a person, as a young man, there’s some steel in there.”

Rachel Zegler, who’s playing Juliet to Connor’s Romeo, was relieved by “how much he cared about the work,” she told me in an email. “We seemed to both have the same fears about doing this coveted material for so many people eight times a week. And in shared anxiety, you form a bond. I’ve only grown to love him more as time has gone on.” Plus, “he also teases me a ton, which is nice to break the tension of working on a tragedy.”

When we speak, Connor is just weeks into rehearsals for Romeo + Juliet. He already describes that production, and Warfare too, as life-changing. “I sometimes stop myself and think, ‘Wow, I’m kind of walking among my heroes,’’’ he tells us back at the table. It’s a reward in itself, “just being able to have those people and see them up close and work with them or meet them or talk to them.” He reckons he’s been saying that Andrew Scott is one of the best actors alive for as long as he’s been giving interviews, and he also has his eye on how his Warfare costar Joe Quinn is “crafting a hell of a career.” He loves nothing more than telling a friend he enjoyed their latest project: “There’s something really nice about being able to watch a film and know a person and be like, ‘That was fucking unbelievable.’” He had that same feeling when he and fellow Heartstopper castmate Tobie Donovan went to see Locke on Broadway.