Kit Connor Wasn't Ready

The star of Netflix's teen rom-com Heartstopper was forced to come out by the show's fans. He's not letting them get to him anymore.

- Jackson McHenry

KIT CONNOR MADE what was possibly the biggest decision of his life while lying in bed scrolling through Twitter. It was October 31, and the British actor, then 18, was in the middle of shooting the second season of Heartstopper, the young-adult Netflix romance series in which he plays Nick Nelson, a bisexual-but-hasn’t-realized-it-yet jock who becomes the primary love interest of the central character, the gay misfit Charlie (played by Joe Locke). The show is a rose-tinted, and often more than a little didactic, depiction of British high-school life, based on the webcomic that became a series of graphic novels by Alice Oseman, which had sold 1 million copies before the release of the TV adaptation. The story takes place in a universe a few ticks closer to utopia than ours, where people still experience the hardships of teenage-dom but have the emotional intelligence and the language to overcome them. Characters talk directly, for instance, about the danger of trying to put a label on someone like Nick’s sexuality without really knowing them or to pry them out of the closet. It’s all filmed with a layering of soft filters and edited with fanciful doodling over the screen.