Here’s why Joe Locke sometimes gets sick of playing queer characters

Joe Locke is about to take over television from all directions. On Disney+, he’ll be starring in the new Marvel series Agatha All Along, which premieres in September, and on Netflix, he’ll be reprising his breakthrough role of Charlie Spring for Heartstopper’s third season, releasing in October. Like Locke himself, both characters happen to be queer — a fact he sometimes resents, as he revealed in a new interview.

“I find all of it quite overwhelming,” Locke told Variety. “In a good way, but still overwhelming. Sometimes I feel very accepting of it, and some days I want to push it away because I’m afraid of — I don’t know — the responsibility of it, almost.”

Indeed, at only 20 years old, Locke is already what some would call a gay icon. It’s both an honor, and, as Locke pointed out, a restriction on what people think he’s capable of.

“There are days that I never want to play a gay character again,” he said. “Most of the casting I get sent are for gay characters.” Locke went on, saying he feels pressure to prove that he’s not “a one-trick pony who was just the guy from Heartstopper.” 

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“Which in itself is maybe a problem of the industry, or a problem of me and my internalized homophobia,” he continued. “I don’t know.”

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Locke’s frustration with Hollywood’s shoehorning of gay actors into gay roles makes perfect sense, but he said that with his character in Agatha All Along, Marvel is doing queer representation the right way.

“The show never shies away from his queerness, but it’s not a defining feature of his character,” Locke said. “It’s just one layer of him as a person.”

That doesn’t mean the portrayal hasn’t garnered criticism, despite very little of Locke’s character appearing in the show’s advertising so far. A single gay gasp in the show’s trailer was enough to send the Marvel fandom into an anti-gay frenzy, which Locke also addressed.

 “It was like, ‘Oh, why has Marvel done this campy gay stereotype?’” Locke recalled. “It really annoyed me because I was like, ‘You can’t ask for authentic casting and then be upset if you have a camp character.’” 

It’s disappointing, but not unexpected, Locke said: “I’m fully aware that the Marvel fandom is far less nice than the Heartstopper fandom. There’s going to be a lot of people that just hate everything about the character and everything about what I’ve done with it, and I just have to be OK with that.”

Meanwhile, Locke is gearing up for the reactions to Season 3 of Heartstopper, which he said is “growing up.”

“The second half of the season is about sex,” he said, which lines up with his co-star Kit Connor’s hint that the season would be “hotter” and “raunchier” than the show had ever gotten. We’ll be streaming both of Locke’s shows when Agatha All Along premieres on September 18 and Heartstopper premieres on October 3.