Dream Date
Brushes with our celebrity crushes.
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Kit Connor, 21, looks up at the oldest potted plant in the world, a 250-year-old cycad that threatens to shatter the ceiling of the Kew Gardens Palm House. Lush, green, and stretching over 330 acres, the Gardens have seen their fair share of legends in the past: Britain’s first kangaroos; generations of royalty; a suffragette who burned down one of its buildings in the 1910s. But the Croydon-born Connor, until now, hasn’t been one of them. “You know, an American friend told me he comes here all the time when he’s in town,” he says, calmly. “Maybe I came here as a kid,” he adds, but he has no memory of it.
The peace of the radiant Palm House is temporary. Suddenly Connor notices we’re surrounded by gaggles of school children. For the past three years, this particular demographic — as young as 10, no older than their late teens — has caused pangs of anxiety for Connor, who after years as a child actor, became significantly more famous when he was cast as the romantic lead of Netflix’s tween series Heartstopper. The show, based on a series of successful graphic novels by Alice Oseman, transformed each of its stars into Gen-Z poster children when it dropped on the streamer in 2021. It’s been watched, according to Netflix’s figures, for hundreds of millions of hours.
Anxious to avoid a ceaseless sea of selfies and squeals, we think quickly: The golf buggy we’ve been carted around in by Sarah, our Kew Gardens tour guide, would make a great getaway car. Sandwiched between the two of us, he wiggles past the smallest group of schoolkids in blue sweaters. One girl clocks him, gazing longingly but too awestruck to speak. We reach the door and he’s out. “This has been massively successful,” he says.
Six months before we met, Connor had swapped the English capital for New York City, rehearsing for, and then performing in, an energetic, musically informed take on Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet at Circle in the Square Theatre. After it ended, he came home for a few weeks, only to return to the States for the Oscars, where he celebrated The Wild Robot, the Best Animated Feature nominee he appeared in last year as a plucky gosling with a cyborg mother. The demographic familiar with Connor may soon shift a little older when he makes a grown-up leap this month, playing a Navy SEAL in Warfare, the new action drama from Alex Garland and Iraq war veteran Ray Mendoza.
Based on true events and told in real time, Warfare follows a battalion of American soldiers in 2006 as they attempt to take down a cell of terrorists in a small Iraqi town during the war on terror. When their cover is blown and the siege reverses, the soldiers have to find a way to escape. It’s excruciating and violent, hangnail cinema — close to a horror film. Connor’s character, Tommy, is the newbie of the group: a “gunner” who fires some of the film’s first bullets but is so young and inexperienced that his face remains a perpetual shade of gray throughout the film.
Every generation gets their Platoon, Apocalypse Now, or Saving Private Ryan. In Warfare, Connor was the youngest of the band of talked-about actors who all signed on, among them Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai. The rehearsal process was intense. “We spent the first three weeks training, and within the first week we were saying ‘I love you’ to each other,” he says, arm hanging over the front passenger seat of the buggy. Connor, who was already jacked, got even bigger in that process. Every day, while they prepared to film on the outskirts of London last spring, “we did a hundred Navy SEAL push-ups, and it was awful,” he says. “For the firearms training, they wanted us to be safe and no one had to worry about putting anyone at risk. Then there’s the tactical aspect: We had to move and think like our characters.”
Garland’s previous film, Civil War, imagined what an American war might look like years in the future between two political sides. It was particularly controversial in the wake of the Trump presidency, with some viewers criticizing what felt like a “both sides” perspective. That film was dystopic; Warfare is rooted in historical circumstances. The characters in Mendoza’s screenplay are based on real people, and while the person who inspired Connor’s character cannot be mentioned by name, he spent an hour talking with the actor about the part. “He was a 20- or 21-year-old guy on his first mission,” Connor says. “He hadn’t experienced risk before.”
Casting someone who fit that demographic was crucial, Garland tells me, “to be accurate about the age at which men are sent into combat.” Of the pack, Connor looks the most innocent, like a kid confronting death before they can even legally drink. He even reminded the director of his own son. But Garland wasn’t leaning into Connor’s puppy-dog image, nor did he cast him in an attempt to subvert it: He had only “vaguely” heard of Heartstopper. “There was no issue of escaping his heartthrob perception,” Garland says, “because I didn’t know about it!”
Connor didn’t have any personal experiences to draw from — he hadn’t even been born yet when the U.S. invaded Iraq, and would have been too young to remember the fallout of the events that occurred when the film takes place — so studying the history with Mendoza was crucial. “I’m a British guy born in 2004. I was looking at it thinking: This war wasn’t good,” he says. “The goal of the film was to be an unfiltered portrayal of it, so you get the good and the bad. There’s a lot of bad — and not just for the soldiers.” The film opens with the Navy SEALs raiding the home of an Iraqi family and using it as an outpost, with the family kept in a bedroom behind armed guards. It is unclear how far the soldiers will actually go to protect them. “That was important to me reading the script,” Connor says. “The impact of this war not just on the soldiers but of the Iraqi family whose house gets taken over.”
To give the film a sense of heightened reality, some of the takes lasted as long as ten minutes. In those moments, every actor — whether the camera was focused on them or not — acted as if they were in that scenario. “I saw it as good prep for Romeo + Juliet,” Connor says, “because you wouldn’t want to switch off.”
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After successfully dodging more schoolkids, Connor and I head down the road to Maids of Honour, a teahouse that looks like it was plucked out of Shakespeare’s time. We sit down, surrounded by tourists drinking tea and eating cream cakes, and order two filter coffees. “That’s what six months in New York does to you,” Connor says, half-joking.
Going from Heartstopper to Warfare to Broadway was a “ballsy” move, Connor tells me. He had wanted to do Shakespeare for a while, or rather, “I really wanted to know if I could.” So when the offer came through in January 2024 to make his Broadway debut in a boundary-pushing production of Romeo + Juliet, where he would star opposite a celebrated fellow young actor, Rachel Zegler, he couldn’t say no. If the production itself was a little divisive — too colorful and peppy for the purists — Connor was often singled out by critics for his work in it. (The Telegraph called his performance a “knockout.”) But as soon as previews had begun, clips and images from the show appeared on social media, the strict “no cameras” rule often ignored.
One scene was particularly difficult: when the star-crossed lovers kiss on a bed that descends from the ceiling. “I’d take my shirt off and see camera flashes from the audience,” he says. “There was something quite seedy about that. But I … Yeah …” He catches himself realizing that he’s talking about the pains of being fancied, lest he be perceived as narcissistic, or ungrateful to have such a responsive audience. But it’s normal to be troubled by the way people see you, I tell him. “It’s hard to talk about it,” he says, a little sullen. “It upset me at times, not because I felt objectified — and I did feel objectified at times, I’m not undermining that feeling — but what upset me more was that scene came right after my ‘Banished’ scene, in which Romeo threatens to kill himself.”
The whole experience reminded Connor that to many audiences, he was still their teen idol. “I grew up very self-conscious. I used to stand on a train platform and all I could think was, That person thinks I’m an idiot or That person thinks my haircut’s shit,” he says. “When Heartstopper came out, there was this evidence that my brain could use as a supply: that they might actually be thinking that.” A Google search will tell you nothing solid about Connor’s romantic life or where in London he lives. After invested Heartstopper fans pressured him to reveal his sexuality on social media in 2022, he has kept a low profile, determined not to let any new experiences in his career bring him back to a mental space he’s already moved past.
Connor tells me he thinks of himself as a “perfectionist” when it comes to performing. “It felt like this unscalable mountain,” he says of being onstage eight times a week, pouring us each another cup of coffee. “I’d get very upset if I didn’t feel like I’d done a good job. I’d come backstage and be furious with myself.”
His co-star, Zegler, tells me she thought Connor’s performance every night was “flawless,” so she developed a way of dealing with his self-flagellation “in a very tongue-in-cheek way.” Over the several months Connor played Romeo, the chance to improve became an obsession. A productive kind of personal torture? He nods and sips. “Exactly. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
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A week later, Connor finds himself back in the States, looking out of the window of his hotel room onto an unusually gray Los Angeles, another stop on the Warfare press tour. “I’m just glad I don’t have to put on sunscreen today,” he says.
The Hollywood machine is keeping him busy, with one of the biggest career questions being whether or not he’ll return for a fourth season of Heartstopper. The fanbase is a bit panicked at the moment. What will happen when the high-school years have to end? Alice Oseman, who wrote the graphic novels, has said that the fourth season, if it happens, would be the last. Connor has no news to share on the matter, other than the sentiment that he and the series team wouldn’t want to be “making it just for the sake of making it.” Or, as he puts it more bluntly, speaking of his mother on the show: “You don’t want to see Olivia Colman driving a 30-year-old Kit Connor to high school.”
Whether or not he’ll be back for another Heartstopper season, return to the stage, or star in a big-budget studio flick, “good writing, good filmmaker, good role” is what Connor says he’s looking for these days, before nebulously teasing that he has a few projects coming up that he’s not yet allowed to talk about. “I find a lot of Hollywood to be very alien to myself and maybe overwhelming,” he says. “However, I was also the kid who wanted to be a movie star.”
Production Credits
- Photography by Chantal Anderson
- Styling by Felicity Kay
- Photo Assistants: Aaron Beckum
- Groomer: Coco Ullrich
- The Cut, Editor-in-Chief Lindsay Peoples
- The Cut, Photo Director Noelle Lacombe
- The Cut, Deputy Culture Editor Brooke Marine
- The Cut, Market Editor Emma Oleck
