He shared that he thought it was an opportunity to show he’s more than “a one-trick pony who was just the guy from Heartstopper,” and added that that feeling “in itself is maybe a problem of the industry or a problem of me and my internalised homophobia.”
Samuel Dore
Speaking to GQ around the same time as the previous interviews, Locke said he finds himself “wanting to go to the other extreme” whenever an opportunity to play a gay character comes across his desk. “Every time I get sent a gay role, I’m like, ‘I want to play, like, a straight Republican,’” he quipped. “I think I’m really in my head at the moment over being typecast as just playing a camp gay role. But it’s a me thing. It’s a thing I need to get over, myself.”
Speaking to The Guardian a month later, he further talked about his fears of being typecast. “I get a lot of auditions for more gay teenage characters, very similar parts, and, while they’re great, I’ve played two gay characters now,” Locke said, referring to Heartstopper‘s Charlie and Agatha All Along‘s Teen/Wiccan. “Not that I would not want to play another gay character, but I want to be a versatile actor, not get stamped,” he clarified.
In that interview, Locke also manifested a villainous role instead of an action role. “I want to play a villain; I want to play a part where you get to explore elements of humanity that you would never get to do in real life. Someone completely different to me. But who knows, maybe I am authentically evil,” he said.
A version of this article was published on Teen Vogue.