Joe Locke on ‘Heartstopper’ Embracing Sex, Being a Queer Marvel Star in ‘Agatha’ and Why ‘There Are Days I Never Want to Play a Gay Character Again’
In late April 2023, Joe Locke, then 19, secured VIP tickets to Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” in Atlanta, where he was shooting the Marvel Studios series “Agatha All Along.” It’d been just over a year since Locke made his professional acting debut in Netflix’s “Heartstopper,” an achingly gentle love story about two British teenage boys that had transformed into a generation-defining sensation.
The show’s fans had been flooding TikTok and Instagram — and, of course, Locke’s mentions — with all manner of swoony tributes, so he wasn’t all that shocked when, just minutes after he arrived at his seat, a stream of Swifties began handing him friendship bracelets. “I had, like, a whole arm of them,” Locke says with a giggle. “I was secretly trying to take them off so people wouldn’t notice, because it was cutting off the circulation.” The sudden, intense attention did, however, take Locke’s guests that night by surprise.
They knew he was popular, but to watch fan after fan approach, their faces filled with exuberance and awe at getting to share a moment with Locke? “I was unprepared,” says “Agatha All Along” showrunner Jac Schaeffer. “It’s clear he means so much to them because he’s willing to be his authentic self.” There has never been anyone quite like Joe Locke.
It’s not just that he came out years before “Heartstopper,” first to his mother at 12, and then more broadly at 15; it’s that he is so forthrightly gay, from merrily flipping off homophobic protesters at the 2022 London Pride to using a speech for his hometown Pride event on the Isle of Man that same year to demand the local government lift the ban on gay men donating blood.
