Kit Connor and the career that Heartstopper couldn’t contain

Kit Connor

Photo: France RC – Roster Con / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 8, 2004 Croydon, England
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Ready Player One, The Wild Robot, Rocketman
Awards	Emmy · Royal Television Society · Theatre World · BIFA Best Performance (shared)

The work Kit Connor is building now looks almost nothing like the work that made him famous. He has spent the past twelve months executive-producing the final chapter of Heartstopper and playing a Navy SEAL out of options in Alex Garland’s Iraq war film Warfare. The actor who made a generation of queer teenagers feel less alone has been learning what fear looks like when there is nowhere to put it — and the distance between those two truths is the measure of the career he is assembling.

Connor was born in Croydon, South London, on 8 March 2004. His parents work in advertising; he has an older sister and brother. He grew up in Purley and attended Whitgift School in Croydon, where he studied drama, English literature, and history. He made his screen debut at eight, landing the lead in Get Santa, a Warner Bros. Christmas film. A recurring role in CBBC’s Rocket’s Island followed, then appearances in War & Peace and SS-GB, a stage debut at Donmar Warehouse, and roles in three British films across 2018. None of it was fame. All of it was accumulation.

The role that shifted his register arrived in 2019. As the older young Elton John in Rocketman, Connor had perhaps four minutes on screen in a film full of spectacle — a teenager who already knows what the music wants from him. The internal precision was harder to fake than the choreography around it. That same year he began voicing Pantalaimon in HBO and BBC One’s His Dark Materials, three seasons of invisible work: a character whose emotional life must track every shift in Lyra’s story without a face to carry it. He did it for three years without being noticed for it, which is exactly what the job required.

In April 2022, Heartstopper arrived on Netflix. Connor had auditioned for the role of Charlie Spring; he was cast as Nick Nelson instead. Nick is the rugby player who works out slowly and with some surprise that he loves his best friend. Connor played him with a held-back certainty — not softness deployed as performance, but the quality of someone who knows the answer before he knows the question. The series became something unusual: critically embraced, distributed across more than three dozen countries, and adopted with real feeling by a generation of queer teenagers who had not seen themselves on screen quite like this. He won the inaugural Children’s and Family Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Performance, followed by a Royal Television Society Award for Leading Actor. Forbes listed him on their 30 Under 30 Europe roll. The UK Pride Power Lists named him three years running.

The other thing that happened, in October 2022, was that a portion of the same fanbase outed him. The mechanism was specific and now well-documented: Connor had been photographed holding hands with actress Maia Reficco; a faction concluded this amounted to queerbaiting, a charge that required him to disclose his sexuality as the price of being believed. He had previously said he preferred not to label himself publicly. The response was a tweet: “I’m bi. Congrats for forcing an 18 year old to out himself.” Creator Alice Oseman and his co-stars voiced their support. The conversation moved on. Connor returned to work, on different terms than before.

The Broadway production of Romeo + Juliet, which opened in October 2024 at the Circle in the Square Theatre with Rachel Zegler opposite him, directed by Sam Gold, was not an obviously comfortable move for an actor whose public image had been built on gentleness. The production was contemporary, physical, and loud; it asked him to be unreliable and reckless in ways that Nick Nelson never was. He won a Theatre World Award for his Romeo; the Drama League and the Outer Critics Circle both nominated him. The cleaner break came with Warfare — Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Iraq war film, drawn from Mendoza’s own time in Mosul. Connor played Tommy, the youngest SEAL in a platoon that runs out of time in a house that runs out of exits. There is no charm in the role. The film earned a BIFA for ensemble performance, and Garland immediately cast Connor in the A24 Elden Ring adaptation he is directing, due in 2028, alongside Cailee Spaeny, Ben Whishaw, and Nick Offerman.

In August 2026, Marvel Studios confirmed Connor as Scott Summers — Cyclops — in the studio’s X-Men reboot, directed by Jake Schreier, alongside Samara Weaving as Emma Frost and Sadie Sink as Jean Grey. Heartstopper Forever, the feature-length conclusion to the Netflix series, released on 17 July 2026, with Connor for the first time as executive producer alongside creator Alice Oseman.

Andrew Haigh’s A Long Winter, written from a Colm Tóibín story and co-starring Fred Hechinger and Caitríona Balfe, is in production. Elden Ring opens in March 2028. The X-Men project has no release date yet. What Connor is building in that space — between the warmth that made him findable and the fear and scale he is moving toward — is a second version of himself that the first version could not have predicted, and did not need to.