Charlie Heaton After Stranger Things, Playing the Sons of Josh Hartnett and Tommy Shelby

Charlie Heaton

Photo: JoshPopov / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 6, 1994 Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Marrowbone, The New Mutants, Shut In
Awards	SAG Award (shared)

In Netflix‘s Below, a six-part thriller about something moving under the water off a Newfoundland fishing town, Charlie Heaton plays Wade Penney, the son a stubborn fisherman keeps trying to shield. The fisherman is Josh Hartnett. Heaton has also been cast as Charles Shelby, the boy Tommy Shelby left behind, in Steven Knight’s Peaky Blinders sequel, and he has just spent a feature film chasing a missing father figure played by Al Pacino. For an actor who spent a decade as the quiet older brother with a camera round his neck, it is a revealing run of parts. Each one is defined by the man standing in front of him.

That older brother was Jonathan Byers in Stranger Things, and for ten years he was the reason most viewers knew Heaton’s face. Jonathan was the Hawkins lead who watched: the photographer, the son who stood by his mother and went searching for his missing brother while the younger cast got the monsters and the speeches. The series closed with Jonathan heading to film school in New York and parting from Nancy Wheeler, a breakup Heaton defended on its own terms. He called it honest, and said it showed who the two characters had grown into. What his first year without the show is testing is simpler and harder: whether an actor so good at standing slightly behind the frame can be the person the frame is built around.

He reached that question by an unlikely road. Charles Ross Heaton arrived in Leeds on 6 February 1994 and grew up in Bridlington, on the Yorkshire coast, raised by his mother on a council estate. He did not go to drama school. At 16 he moved to London to play drums, went through several bands and landed in the noise-rock group Comanechi, which supported The Gossip, released an album and kept him on the road for a year and a half. He later drummed for the psychedelic band Half Loon.

The music never entirely left. His friend and castmate Joe Keery put Heaton’s playing and a set of his voicemails into “Charlie’s Garden”, a track on The Crux, the 2025 album Keery released as Djo.

Acting came sideways. Heaton worked as an extra and in commercials while tending bar, then picked up guest parts in British television, in Vera, DCI Banks and Casualty, and a small role as a dealer in Rise of the Footsoldier Part II. When Netflix announced its Hawkins cast in 2015 he was close to unknown. Two films he had already shot followed the series out in 2016: As You Are, an indie drama that premiered at Sundance, and Shut In, a thriller in which he played the near-catatonic teenager Naomi Watts‘s widowed psychologist cares for at home after the car crash that killed his father. In its first season Stranger Things won the cast the Screen Actors Guild Award for ensemble in a drama series.

Between seasons he built a parallel film career that never quite settled into a shape. Marrowbone, Sergio G. Sánchez’s gothic debut, put him beside George MacKay, Anya Taylor-Joy and Mia Goth as one of four siblings hiding a secret in a remote house. The New Mutants, in which he played Sam Guthrie, the mutant known as Cannonball, was held back for more than two years and finally reached cinemas in the summer of 2020 to poor reviews and a weak box office. The most interesting choice was the smallest. In Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II he played Jim, one of the young people around Honor Swinton Byrne’s film student as she turns a ruinous love affair into her graduation film, and he fitted the loose, observational texture of Hogg’s filmmaking in a way the franchise work never allowed.

The less flattering reading of that decade is that Stranger Things made Heaton recognisable without telling anyone what he was for. Jonathan was the least written of the show’s major roles, and outside it the big swings went wrong. In 2018 the BBC cast him as Joseph Merrick in a two-part drama about the Elephant Man; the disability charity Scope called the choice of a non-disabled actor a “missed opportunity”, and the production was later cancelled. The work that suited him best was supporting work, and supporting work rarely builds a lead.

The 2026 slate is the first real attempt to change that. He opened the year with three episodes of the HBO and BBC banking drama Industry as Jim Dycker. He carries Billy Knight, Alec Griffen Roth’s debut feature, as Alex, a film student who finds a box of his late father’s unfinished scripts and a handkerchief embroidered with the name of a reclusive Hollywood figure, then goes looking for the man, played by Pacino. Roth has said Heaton sharpened his craft on set and credited Pacino for much of it. The film premiered at the Rhode Island International Film Festival in August 2025, won best feature at the UK Film Festival in London and was dated for a US release in August 2026.

Below, created by Jesse McKeown and shot in St. John’s, opened the primetime programme of the Toronto International Film Festival in September and reached Netflix on 8 October 2026, with Mackenzie Davis as a visiting marine researcher. The bigger inheritance is the Shelby one. His casting was confirmed in spring 2026: Charles, Tommy’s younger son, comes home from fighting behind enemy lines in the Second World War determined to leave the family business behind, in a 1950s Birmingham where Jamie Bell plays his older half-brother, Duke. Knight is writing two six-episode seasons.

Away from the set Heaton is guarded, and the public facts are few. He became a father at 20, when his son was born in 2014 to the Japanese musician Akiko Matsuura, his bandmate in Comanechi; he has said being a young parent means you “have to grow up very fast”. Since 2016 he has been in a relationship with Natalia Dyer, who played Nancy Wheeler. In October 2017 he was stopped at Los Angeles International Airport over a small quantity of cocaine, was not charged, was sent back to England and later allowed to return to shoot the third season.

Two more films are lined up: Twice Over, Alena Lodkina’s romantic comedy shot in Fremantle with Mia Wasikowska, now in post-production, and a supporting part in Rich Peppiatt’s Netflix period film Bad Bridgets, alongside Colin Farrell and Steve Coogan. The Shelby series will weigh more than either. Charles Shelby is a son trying to walk away from the thing that made his family’s name, and Heaton is an actor trying to walk away from the part that made his.

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Tags: actors, Al Pacino, Josh Hartnett, Stranger Things, Below, Peaky Blinders, Charlie Heaton

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