Charlie Heaton Isn't Your Father's Superhero
Esquire Singapore|April 2020
The star of The New Mutants talks dark roles, the politics of X-Men and life beyond Stranger Things.
Adrienne Westenfeld
Charlie Heaton Isn't Your Father's Superhero

Over the summer of 2017, Charlie Heaton filmed a movie in the Boston suburbs; a staggering two and a half years later, two days before we met in a lofty studio in downtown Manhattan, he saw that film for the first time. The film is The New Mutants, the 13th and supposedly final installment of the X-Men film franchise, which follows a group of teenagers struggling to escape a mental institution while mastering their emerging superpowers. As it languished in cinematic purgatory due to an ever-shifting release date and a corporate merger, the woes of The New Mutants became a regular fixture in Hollywood trade publications, with many doubting that the film would ever achieve a theatrical release. Heaton, the 26-year-old, Leeds-born star of Netflix’s Stranger Things, who rounds out the New Mutants ensemble as Sam Guthrie, found himself sucked into the interminable vortex of this singularly stressful experience. Sitting on a weathered chesterfield sofa with his knees hugged to his chest, clothed in an oversized T-shirt and scuffed sneakers, Heaton is somehow remarkably good-humoured about the once-in-a-lifetime ordeal.

This story is from the April 2020 edition of Esquire Singapore.

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This story is from the April 2020 edition of Esquire Singapore.

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