Loads of talk about being gay – including an interesting tidbit about having to unfriend everyone he knows well on IG, because some of his friends started getting thousands of friend requests from randos – but zilch about his one & only love, Sebastian.
Joe Locke: ‘I’d love to play the first queer Disney prince or Marvel superhero’
"No matter what you were like at 18, you weren’t as cool as Joe Locke. Even if you strip back the chic clothes, the even chicer hotels, and his lead role in Netflix’s latest queer smash Heartstopper, it’s doubtful you knew how to articulate yourself the way he does. It’s clear he’s still settling into fame and adulthood but, if you’d shot into the spotlight at the same time as being able to drink legally, you wouldn’t wear it half as well.
Our interview takes place on the same day as Brighton Beach House’s opening, an almost cartoonishly perfect summer day without a cloud in the sky. He is thoughtful and self-deprecating, funny and arch, and is currently very excited for an evening of drinking Picantes. When I was 18, getting drunk by the beach meant White Lightning and someone’s stomach getting pumped, so I’m thrilled the youth of today have learnt better than we did.
But Locke has not lived a cosmopolitan life. He grew up on the Isle of Man (though Douglas, the island’s hub, was just made a city this year). Life as a Manx boy, says Joe, was ‘incredibly safe and sheltered’. His mum would never worry if he was out late at night, and he spent most of his time ‘with friends, making dens, being in nature’.
While his generation are universally well equipped on navigating sexuality thanks to social media, and growing up gay, he says, wasn’t too big a deal at school, the Isle of Man’s policies on it have not always been as forward-thinking. ‘Whenever you order something from Amazon [to the Isle of Man], you always add an extra day on for delivery,’ explains Locke. ‘It’s like that, but with society as well.’ The island only legalised homosexuality in 1992, after the British government insisted or else be taken to the EU court of human rights. While things have improved – they legalised gay marriage not long after the rest of Britain – there is still not full parity: The Isle of Man has not repealed the ban on gay men donating blood the way the mainland has, something Joe fought for passionately during a recent junior parliament day at school.
Before Heartstopper, the biggest role Locke had was playing Oliver for two weeks at Douglas’s beautiful old Victorian theatre, The Gaiety. Then, in 2021, a family friend flagged that Heartstopper was casting. Locke had friends who loved the books, ‘so I read them all in one night and I was like... I need this part. I will pay anyone off to get this.’ (He didn’t, he asked me to clarify). So, he sent off his headshot and got asked to attend the first of a series of Zoom auditions.
After meetings with the director and casting director, Locke was asked to do a ‘chemistry read’ with Kit Connor, who went on to play Nick to Locke’s Charlie. How, I had to ask, does a chemistry read – designed to see how people mesh together – work over Zoom? Locke has no idea, especially because ‘it was the episode three scene when they kiss for the first time’, which involves the deeply Zoom-antagonistic combination of a kiss, followed by a silence, followed by a kiss. As weird as it may have been, they smashed it, and he was flown over to Windsor for an in-person audition.
Because it was during lockdown, the cost of doing so was his parents moving out of their house so Locke could isolate with their dog. His audition was on Wednesday, and by Friday he got a call from his agent. He re-enacts the deep breathing he did when he saw the phone buzz, knowing ‘this is the phone call that might change my life’. Luckily, it did: he celebrated, alone, with a Domino’s pizza (dropped off at the end of the driveway, of course).