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Charlie Heaton’s Wild Ride

Charlie Heaton is still a little shocked it turned out like this. Or if he is not shocked—if, as I suspect, some part of him always knew he would wind up famous—he is at least surprised that it all happened so quickly. “I had this crazy trajectory,” he says. “I went from literally living in a hostel in L.A. at the beginning of 2015 to shooting Stranger Things at the end of 2015.”

As you might imagine, Heaton no longer lives in a hostel, but he has spent a surprising amount of time in creepy places: the shuttered medical facilities that speckle America, haunted little polyps in states with compelling tax breaks for filmmakers. “We shot just outside Boston, in an old abandoned mental institute,” he says over breakfast in New York in his reedy, crackly British accent. Heaton is talking about The New Mutants, the long-delayed X-Men film he shot way back in 2017, but he’s riffing on what he’s learned about America too. “You have so many weird mental institutions,” he says with a chuckle, including the one that doubles as the fictional Hawkins National Laboratory he frequents on the set of Stranger Things, “that you just push people in, it seems.”

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“He works from his heart, which is as big as a planet.” —Winona Ryder

Heaton’s familiarity with our nation’s network of unoccupied mental hospitals is thanks in part to his having caught—and continuing to ride—two enormous, fan-driven waves in Stranger Things and the X-Men spin-off. This country’s film and television viewers, it seems, want nothing more than to watch an unending series of comic-book-derived and -adjacent properties starring attractive young people. Heaton, 26 and possessing both a shadowy allure and a glorious head of hair he keeps carefully mussed, can credit that desire for much of his success.

His characters seem to be conscious of their darker parts—and eager to hide them. On Stranger Things, he plays Jonathan Byers, the initially awkward, increasingly heroic older brother of one of the show’s starring gang of kids. The role, cocreator Matt Duffer tells me, required a difficult mix for a young actor: cool, but not quite aware of it: “In a lot of ways, he's very similar to Jonathan in that he's a really cool guy, but he's got an anxious, sensitive quality,” he says. “[Charlie is] a very soulful person. He's, like, as far as you can get from a douchebag. That's hard to find.” And Heaton’s approach feels lived-in, imbued with a hesitant, wounded quality. “He works from his heart, which is as big as a planet,” his costar—and onscreen mother—Winona Ryder explains in an email.

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Heaton’s in New York now with his girlfriend (and Stranger Things costar), Natalia Dyer, back from shooting a TV project in Madrid. He grew up in a coastal British town, watching Poltergeist 2 on VHS, but would eventually pick up the drums and tour a few times with a grimy noise-pop band called Comanechi. As the band was falling apart, he started auditioning for commercials. That led to an agent, which led to more auditions, which led to something better than commercials: confidence. “I don’t want to say things happened easy,” he says, but one gets the sense that things happened easy—and for good reason. “I wasn’t totally oblivious to what was going on. I had done acting at school, and it felt like something that came very naturally to me,” he says, and he was gratified to be receiving positive feedback on the work.

And then all of a sudden, one big break piled atop the next, with the biggest possible break—a little sci-fi project from a not-yet-dominant studio called Netflix—settling atop the stack. “I had this turbulent, crazy year, and then the show came out in 2016 and it was like this”—this meaning screaming fans, paparazzi, seemingly endless travel—“overnight.” Like many young actors, he faced some growing pains, notably making headlines in 2017 after trace amounts of cocaine were reportedly found in his luggage at LAX. While he wasn’t arrested or charged with a crime, he was denied entry into the U.S., causing him to miss the show’s season-premiere party.

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Luckily, he has had help navigating the noise that comes with newfound fame. He cites Ryder as an invaluable resource in helping him figure out the job, and the life that comes with it. “Having her, this huge icon, just be like, ‘Hi’—she just gave me a hug and was so normal,” he says of their first scene together. “It was like, Oh, we can all just be here and do our jobs. Just having that support,” he says—“like a mother, really”—means the world.

The feeling was mutual. “I felt an immediate, deep connection with Charlie that was surprising, as it usually takes time to build the kind of bond with the person you're working with. I think it was largely due to his being so incredibly open as an actor, both emotionally and with his approach. We barely knew each other, yet within a few days of shooting, I felt like he was my kid and I could go anywhere with him,” Ryder says. “It’s kind of a naked feeling, to feel so incredibly vulnerable with someone. But with Charlie it was all there, all just pure trust. I felt like we sheltered each other when we needed it. Which, in my case, was often.”

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He’s not quite one of the show’s grown-ups—established actors like Ryder, David Harbour, and Matthew Modine—but neither is he one of the youngsters who are the show’s true stars. He’s not unhappy about that: Being sucked into the Stranger Things phenomenon is “still terrifying,” but “I got my awkward years out of the way. I'm not having to grow up in the spotlight as a 14- or 15-year-old. If I look back at me at 15, I couldn't do what the kids do.”

Instead, Heaton is in the middle, and he’s grateful to be there with fellow twentysomething costars Joe Keery and Natalia Dyer. That Heaton and Dyer are now dating is no longer a secret, but they were long cagey about the particulars. When I ask why, he explains that they weren’t being sneaky—they were young coworkers on a huge job interested in each other, and they didn’t want to mess with anything. “We didn't really know what the relationship was,” he says. The caginess, anyway, might have been unnecessary. “That first audition, we did a chemistry read with [Heaton and] Natalia,” Duffer says, “and sparks were flying.”

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Now Heaton is learning his onscreen reputation precedes him. “They see you as one thing, and you continue to do that,” he says of the industry. “Do you want to play this really awkward, offbeat outsider? Yeah. I can—but I can do other things. It’s having people trust that you can do other things, or proving it to them.” And so a role as an emotionally turbulent youth on Stranger Things led to a role in New Mutants as...an emotionally turbulent youth.

Which, he stresses, is totally fine—it is undeniably cool to play a character named Cannonball, who “can project himself through the sky in an impenetrable force field.” But the prospect was initially daunting, and not for stunt-work reasons. “I remember being quite scared about doing it,” he says of the idea that he “might be signing away for the next five years.” Because I get the sense that what Heaton would really like to do is something a little less supernatural.

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I ask if there’s anyone whose career he’d like to model his after, and he gives the answer that any young, leading-adjacent actor might. “Not in an aspect where it’s like, Wow, I want to be Robert Pattinson,” he says. “But having seen him come off this huge show”—the Twilight franchise—“he’s made these really interesting choices. He’s done The Lighthouse, and he did Good Time. Obviously now he’s doing Batman, but I think he’s chosen to work with interesting directors, and I feel a lot of respect for him.”

After Stranger Things finished up in 2018, Heaton set about gathering the skills that might one day allow him to pull a Pattinson. He spent four weeks in Texas shooting an addiction drama with Catherine Keener, and later did a week on the set of The Souvenir: Part II, the sequel to Joanna Hogg’s emotionally lacerating 2019 film. Hogg’s method is unique: She trains her camera on a scene—a dinner party, say—and asks her actors to improvise everything, outside of a few words of character description. Heaton, with zero classical training, to say nothing of an improv background, was eager for the challenge—and worried about pulling it off. “You start in the morning and you’d be absolutely terrified,” he says, “and then you shoot, and then every day you go home with this buzz. You’re like, Wow, it was so alive. I can’t believe I did that. And then it would start again every morning, where you’re dreading going to work.”

It’s not exactly shooting in an abandoned mental hospital, but it’s scary nonetheless. And so far, Heaton has learned, doing the scary stuff tends to work out.

Sam Schube is GQ's senior editor.


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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Sharif Hamza
Styled by Jon Tietz
Grooming by Adam Markarian using Oribe haircare
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub
Set design by Dorothée Baussan for MHS Artists

Originally Appeared on GQ