In ‘Agatha All Along,’ Joe Locke Works Like a Charm

Joe Locke nailed his first audition. He was 6 and up for a part in an amateur production of “The Wizard of Oz,” and he easily secured a callback. But when he was told he would have to return for another audition, the thought of trying out again reduced him to tears. He declined the callback. The role went to a different child. “It did traumatize me a bit,” Locke said.

“And,” he added, ducking his chin toward the neck of his cream-colored hoodie, “I was always a crier.”

Locke got older. He got bolder. He threw himself into school plays, Christmas pantomimes, community theater in his home on the Isle of Man. “I come from a very small place where individuality is less embraced,” he said. Onstage, playing pretend, he could express more.

He planned to apply to drama school. Then a family friend alerted him to an open call for a new TV show, “Heartstopper,” a drama about queer English teens adapted from Alice Oseman’s emotion-heavy comics.

At 17, after multiple callbacks, he beat out thousands of other young men to play 14-year-old Charlie Spring, the only openly gay student at an English preparatory school. “Heartstopper,” which became one of Netflix’s most watched shows when it debuted in 2022, was a showcase for Locke’s boyish, beetle-browed charm and uncanny ability to wear his heart on the sleeve of his rugby shirts.