The End of an Era: Inside ‘Heartstopper Forever’ and the Show That Changed British YA

It’s week six of Heartstopper Forever’s seven-week shoot, and the 75-degree weather is only slightly unbearable to the U.K. crew and extras huddled on set under canopies or milling about the yard outside of a home. From the outside, a room with floor-to-ceiling bow windows is shrouded in rainbow tinsel. Inside, a lively party plays out — a cacophony of voices, skin, shimmer, bottles, joy and hormones on repeat. The house is at the Windsor Road-edge of the historic Bray Studios, tucked between the River Thames and a section of the A308 motorway, in the hamlet of Water Oakley. Their own chapter of U.K. film history, the grounds are the former base for Hammer Film Productions, and a home to everything from Dr. Who special effects filming to rehearsal facilities for music giants like Pink Floyd.

Now, seven soundstages and nearly as many offices and workshops serve as a key site for TV hits, in this case, the final chapter of Netflix‘s LGBTQIA+ YA hit Heartstopper.Outside, the celebratory scene replays, almost bittersweet, as the voice of director Wash Westmoreland commands the cameras and his ensemble, now thoroughly in young adulthood, from an invisible space across the room. Again and again, Joe Locke’s Charlie, the fictional Truham Grammar School’s newly minted head boy, receives a warm and rousing show of love with the help of his boyfriend, Nick Nelson (Kit Connor). Now, a year and a day after that moment on set, the movie Heartstopper Forever releases, marking the end of an era. The two-hour feature is the final chapter in Netflix’s adaptation of Alice Oseman’s popular webcomic and graphic novel that ran for three seasons.

The highly anticipated swan song is both a figurative and literal coming-of-age for its cast and creator, Oseman, who began writing and drawing the graphic novel in 2016, two years after securing a six-figure publishing deal when they were just 17. Following the debut of their webcomic and a successful 2018 Kickstarter campaign resulting in the graphic novel treatment, in 2022 Netflix released its adaptation of Oseman’s popular story about gay teen Charlie Spring as he navigates school, friendships, mental health and coming out amid a burgeoning romance with idyllic boyfriend Nick Nelson. 

“For me, it has been nearly 10 years. It’s basically been my 20s,” Oseman told The Hollywood Reporter last July in an office at Bray Studios, set just 26 miles outside central London. “I can see in the story that the way I interact with the world and the ideas and the themes that I find interesting have shifted and developed in that time.”

Executive producer Patrick Walters added, “It’s the first show that I’d produced, the first show that [Oseman] had written and when we were stepping onto set, we were doing it in those roles for the first time with actors who’d never led a show before in Kit and Joe. It mirrored a lot of our personal experiences, and we didn’t really know what we were doing. We felt our way through. Now we’re on the set for the final time, and we really know what we want. We operate, communicate and do things in a more experienced way.”

Before the film, Heartstopper the series spent multiple weeks in Netflix’s Top 10 across three seasons, with its eight-episode debut alone garnering upward of 53.5 million hours viewed — all with a young, first-time showrunner at the helm. “My entire career until this TV show-slash-film, I worked by myself, and suddenly I’m working with hundreds of people,” Oseman told reporters last year. “It’s required me to learn how to trust other people with something that I care so much about.”

Heartstopper Forever ties up several threads among Nick, Charlie and their small ensemble of friends, setting them up for the next chapter of their lives. “We spent three seasons with these characters, and have seen them through the highs and lows of growing up,” Connor tells THR in a Zoom interview, weeks ahead of the film’s July 17 release. “They’re at a point now where it’s these final decisions and resolutions that need to be made.” 

On the heels of predecessors like Skins, Misfits and My Mad Fat Diary, and alongside contemporaries such as Chewing Gum, Ackley Bridge and Sex Education, Heartstopper has, over the past four years, upended British young adult television. On top of featuring a predominantly LGBTQIA-led cast, it’s been a magnet for leading British talent like Olivia Colman, Jonathan Bailey and Hayley Atwell, with Oseman telling THR they’ve been “incredibly grateful that such talented and in-demand actors have wanted to be a part of it, and that their involvement has brought even more viewers to our little queer story.”

The Netflix series has also been consistently age-appropriate and “like the least British show you could make with its honestness and willingness to articulate itself in a real, sincere and heartfelt way,” says Connor. “As a British man, I’m not saying that Brits are incapable of doing that, but especially when you watch those shows that are quite tongue-in-cheek and very dry, sarcastic and a bit nihilistic at times, it is sort of the anti-British show. Yet a lot of Americans I speak to about Heartstopper say that it feels like this incredibly English thing. So it’s quite funny that it’s maybe changed the perception of what Brits are like.”

Since its arrival, Heartstopper’s tonal approach to LGBTQIA-centric YA romantic storytelling has faced various criticisms for its earnestness and arguably overly aspirational take on growing up queer. For Oseman, Heartstopper did begin “very fairy-tale and a little bit idealistic in a beautiful way” — a byproduct of their own age and experiences when they began writing. But they “never approached it like I’m going to write a wholesome, adorable show, because that’s different to everyone. What we’ve seen is that people do enjoy these very earnest, sincere, joyful shows, and maybe that’s something we haven’t seen a lot of.”

Jenny Walser, who plays Nick’s sister, Tori, adds about the story’s final chapter, “Everyone knows the world is a pretty scary place, especially if you’re also trying to contend with your own identity and where you sit in it. It’s vital that this didn’t just become the sweet, saccharin, rosy show. It’s lovely to know that the next generations have access. It can be really cathartic to watch and heal your younger self.”

Heartstopper’s fans have been on this journey with them for over half a decade, enough time for younger viewers to be ushered into their own adulthood. That now ends with a streaming film, a pivot from TV that Walters said “was made with many factors” in mind, including the schedules of its rising stars, which were “definitely a part of the decision” to switch formats, according to Oseman. It’s a final onscreen turn for Locke and Connor that offers “a slightly more real, gritty look at romance” through the lens of a longer-term relationship.  

“We felt quite conscious that a lot of the audience who have really loved the show and read the comics beforehand are growing up with it,” Walters said at Bray Studios. “So in this final installment, we wanted to really challenge ourselves to make it mature, make it feel very cinematic and authored in a way that’s slightly distinct from the TV series.”

For the film’s cast, including Locke, Connor, Walser, Yasmin Finney, Will Gao, Kizzy Edgell, Corinna Brown, Rhea Norwood and Tobie Donovan, the experience of making Heartstopper Forever has buoyed the story’s own maturation. “Going from television to cinema is almost like it’s growing up. It’s a really nice way of properly finishing the stories,” Locke tells THR over Zoom. “It meant that we had more time to do it right. You have fewer scenes to shoot in a day, so you can put more attention on making them better.”

Heartstopper Forever will see its ensemble at their most mature amid a sea of life changes, yet it will still capture the fluidity of young adulthood. “Especially with certain media, we have to put ourselves in an aesthetic or a box. We’ve become so confined to trying to find our identity externally, we’ve stopped exploring,” says Norwood, whose character, Imogen, is a friend of Nick’s and gets closer to understanding her own sexuality in the film. “But Imogen has always been experimenting. We’ve seen so many different evolutions of her, and that’s been a really beautiful and hopefully truthful thing to have presented.”

Gao, who plays Tao, Charlie’s friend and boyfriend to Finney’s Elle, told reporters last July on set that the film has found him and his co-stars where “we’ve gone through growing into adulthood and [those] growing pains. We bring the fans through into adulthood,” he said. “I feel really proud that we’ve been able to offer this show for people. Sometimes growing up is difficult and comes with loads of challenges. I would have loved to have [had] this show when I was younger, it would’ve made things a lot clearer.”