Kit Connor and Joe Locke Shot Way More Sex for Heartstopper Forever Than Made the Final Cut

Heartstopper Forever was always going to be the horniest thing the franchise had ever done. What its two leads have now made clear is that it could have gone considerably further.

Ahead of the finale’s release, Kit Connor and Joe Locke sat down with Brittany Broski for an episode of her Royal Court series and got candid about how much of the film’s mature material never made it past the edit. Gay Times, reporting on the episode, ran the pair’s comments under the headline “It was like a porno,” and described them being “butt naked” for scenes that ended up cut. Their summary of the shoot: “We actually shot a lot of sex.”

What survived is hardly chaste. Four sex scenes made the final film, and they go meaningfully further than anything in the three seasons that preceded it — Charlie and Nick in a blanket fort, an interrupted afternoon behind a locked door, an exchange of I love you mid-act. But Out’s scene-by-scene read of the film lands on the same conclusion most viewers will: the pair have sex often, and the camera stays tender rather than graphic about it, with actual nudity kept limited throughout.

The point was never shock

That restraint reads less like squeamishness than like a decision — and it was a decision the two of them had a hand in, since Connor and Locke both served as executive producers on the film.

“It would be weird if we hadn’t shown it,” Locke told The Guardian, pushing back on the idea that a gentle show has to stay chaste. “Just because our show is a more earnest version of queer representation doesn’t mean that sex [shouldn’t be shown]. It’s still a big thing for anyone in the world.” The scenes are, in his framing, a step past the intimacy the show had already reached in season three rather than a swerve into new territory.

Connor has been blunt about what the process actually requires. “As an actor who is going to partake in an intimate scene, you should always have that sort of autonomy and level of security and safety,” he said. “If you don’t, then something’s gone wrong.”

The two of them are also very funny about how unsexy the filming itself is. Connor’s description of the room — “in a silent room with lots of middle-aged men” — got an immediate assist from Locke: “A camera right next to your face while you’re wearing a cock sock.”

Why the cut matters

For a generation of gay men who grew up with coming-of-age stories that faded to black the moment two boys got horizontal, Heartstopper has always been a slightly complicated gift: tender, affirming, enormously popular, and careful almost to a fault. The finale is where that carefulness loosened — and knowing that a franker cut was shot and then trimmed tells you roughly where the line still sits for a mainstream title with a young audience.

The compromise landed, for what it’s worth. Heartstopper Forever premiered at London’s Cineworld Leicester Square on 14 July before hitting Netflix on 17 July, and critics were kind: 93% on Rotten Tomatoes across 40 reviews. Alice Oseman wrote it, Wash Westmoreland directed, and at 114 minutes it closes out a series that ran three seasons.

Whether that trimmed footage ever surfaces is a different question, and probably a rhetorical one. But the admission is the fun part — the explicit Heartstopper exists somewhere, and its stars are not being remotely coy about it.