He was the quiet heart of Stranger Things, the outsider turned cult favourite. Now, as the Netflix juggernaut wraps for good, Charlie Heaton reflects on fame, family, and why farewelling Jonathan Byers feels like “mourning a death.”
On the corner of a little park in Cabbagetown, a little suburb of east Atlanta, sits a little bistro called Carroll Street Café. The setting sounds cinematic enough to have been whipped up in a latte-fueled Los Angeles writers’ room. But it’s entirely real, and a decade ago, regularly hosted a gaggle of tweens and teens who gathered there, Friends-style. Last year, the same group returned to Carroll Street Cafe one last time – now as adults, family-style.
And that’s all Charlie Heaton will say about farewelling Stranger Things.
Seriously. Though he could easily claim similar bragging rights, no amount of prodding will get Charlie to share whether they marked the end with tattoos – like Orlando Bloom, Sir Ian McKellen, and the rest of the “nine” after The Lord of the Rings – or kept mementos from the set à la the Harry Potter crew (as revealed on their press tours). Instead, it feels a little ironic that while keeping a, perhaps, debaucherous final hurrah under wraps, the 31-year-old Brit will speak freely about the emotional toll of the last season.
“It felt like a loss – like mourning a death,” Charlie explains, adding filming for season five took an entire year, from January to December 2024. “It was kind of devastating, and then there was a bit of shock, and then the next day was just kind of processing.”
This – a decade-long stint on one of the most successful television series in history – was, somewhat famously, never Charlie’s plan. He didn’t have an affinity for structured education and left school at 16, drumming in several bands until he landed on an international tour with punk-rock band Comanechi. Remarkably, acting was a similar coup. As a means of making extra cash, he began to attend open auditions, appearing soon after on a range of British procedurals like DCI Banks and Casualty. Then came an audition for the role of Jonathan Byers, on an original Netflix show called Stranger Things, for which Charlie sent in an audition tape. He won the role after a chemistry read with actor Natalia Dyer, and a Skype interview with executives, during which he impressed them – while seated in a Hammersmith burger bar – with his lack of professional acting experience.
“I heard an older actor say recently that when you are creating a character, you find which parts of yourself you turn up and which parts of yourself you mute,” Charlie says. “But when this came around to creating Jonathan and playing him, he’s so close to me.” For as long as Jonathan Byers has been on screen, he and Charlie Heaton have been compared. It’s easy to understand why – not only do the two share a similar sensibility as sensitive, artistic types, but they also took on immense family responsibility at an early age.
While Jonathan Byers becomes the man of the house after his father’s departure, Charlie Heaton himself was a dad at 20, welcoming his son Archie with his former Comanechi bandmate, Akiko Matsuura.
“Being a young father, you have to grow up very fast,” he explains. “You have to also learn ethical priorities, too, and you’ve got to look after somebody. That’s a big thing. You want to give them good experiences and a lot of love and the hard part obviously is distance. But that’s part of the sacrifice.”
Charlie has travelled a great distance to be here, today, in a nondescript Los Angeles hotel room. Last week he travelled to Australia for a new romantic comedy with Alice In Wonderland star Mia Wasikowska, and only days prior was spotted by celebrity watchdog DeuxMoi in New York (his body is “still catching up,” he says, as room service appears at the door with coffee). This interview is one of many he will do this week, this month, or maybe even today, to promote the final season of Stranger Things. You’d think, for that reason, the show would be the last thing he’d want to talk about – but actually, he can’t help himself. Since Charlie compares his tenure on the show to college, referencing his time on the show is not unlike a high school quarterback stuck in the glory days.
“Think about how much people talk about college, especially in the US,” he says. “Because they were their best days. I think it’s also because there’s not that many times in your life when things are so finite. That’s kind of momentous.”
So, let’s humour him, and indulge in a little nostalgia. He recalls meeting Winona Ryder, who he calls his “rock,” mentoring him with “truthfulness, and honesty with her emotions on-and-off set” in a way that gave him, a 21-year-old from Northern England, permission to be truly vulnerable. Theatre actor David Harbour showed Charlie what it looks like to craft a commanding character capable of conveying profound emotion.
“Me, Joe [Keery] – we all thought that everyone else knew what they were doing, but all of us were terrified,” he remembers.
Among the cast, Charlie and Joe were the ‘in-betweeners,’ so to speak. Not quite fully formed adults when the show began, but no longer children like Millie Bobby Brown or Noah Schnapp. Despite the powerhouse performances of Winona and David, it was the “honesty” of the child actors that Charlie credits primarily for his acting education on the Stranger Things set. Towards the end of filming, the entire set rewatched the younger cast members’ audition tapes, and Charlie was floored all over again.
“I remember, I think Millie said this to me, she thinks season one was her most honest performance. They are just playing and that’s kind of beautiful.”
Midway through the show’s first season, the character of Jonathan Byers teams up with Nancy Wheeler — portrayed by Natalia Dyer, Charlie’s audition partner and another member of Stranger Things’ team zillennial. Rumours of Charlie and Natalia’s romance arose in 2016 – a year into filming – but the pair made their first appearance as an official item in 2017. While going public back then wasn’t a premeditated decision, Charlie says, they did not anticipate the fan reaction to have been, and remain so extreme. Even now, both actors’ comment sections are flooded with requests for more couple content, and whenever they deliver, fans insist their relationship restores “faith in humanity.”
“It’s nice, I guess?” is Charlie’s bemused response to the ceaseless outpouring, acknowledging he and Natalia’s characters’ on-screen romance also “heightens” fan investment.
While relationship experts generally advise against living, working and playing with your partner, Jonathan and Nancy’s intersecting storylines leaves the couple little choice. Creative partnerships, especially, are known to risk volatility – overindexing on emotional intensity and professional envy. Charlie, instead, describes the experience of concurrently working alongside and dating Natalia as “precious.”
“It’s been a gift to work with my best friend,” he says. “To be able to have a shared experience with your partner about the anxiety when you don’t get a job – I know what that feels like, she knows what that feels like. You can be there to talk about it, or when you have a shit day at work, or come away from a scene and you didn’t think it worked. To be able to both understand each other on that level is great.”
During the more difficult, uncertain times – the pandemic, or WGA and SAG strikes – the pair would eschew a TV binge to seek out two-hand plays that they could perform together, at home or in the local park, for each other.
“I know it sounds super nerdy,” Charlie laughs, deflecting the suggestion that he’s a self-serious intellectual. “I’m making myself sound way more cultured than I am.”
It’s a tradition that continued into the last season of Stranger Things, when Charlie and Natalia were living in the same neighbourhood as Joe Keery, Gaten Matarazzo, Finn Wolfhard and Caleb McLaughlin, and eventually, Charlie, Gaten, and Finn, wrote their own play (though any specifics of the project are still under wraps). Between takes, the group would play cards or do puzzles – quiet moments of off-camera connection that Charlie credits with shaping one of the strongest performances of his career.
“There are some scenes in this finale, especially towards the end, where it might be the most honest work I’ve ever had the opportunity to do. I was just looking at [each cast member] being like, I love you. You are here in this one moment. I don’t think I’ll ever have that experience again.”
The word “honest” appears no less than 13 times in the transcript of our conversation. On several occasions, Charlie switches it up with the synonym “truthful.” Anyone who has seen the actor’s (frankly, harrowing) Vanity Fair lie detector interview can attest that Charlie deeply fears appearing deceitful, but it seems holistic authenticity is his ethos and constant pursuit.
The projects Charlie has pursued echo this sensibility, layered narratives steeped in addiction, loss, and emotional reckoning that have been well-received by critics and audiences alike. He will appear as a financial journalist in season four of prestige HBO show, Industry, next year. Recently, Charlie took a role as a Newfoundlander for an untitled Netflix limited series alongside Josh Hartnett, moving to the province for a month to immerse himself in the culture. While he doesn’t necessarily align with a method approach (“I like to approach [acting] from a place of play and not from being serious,” he echoes), Charlie was pleased to find how his body and movement changed unconsciously.
In moments like these, shooting the shit with fishermen in a small town in coastal Canada, Charlie might wonder how Stranger Things inhibited him. It’s only natural to ask, ‘What if ?’, ‘What if the show ran for two, successful seasons, then set him free’, ‘What if he’d never left school, or joined a band, or sought out this…side gig?’ Then what? ‘What might the ten years have looked like for him?’
“In this business, you are always looking at things like, ‘What opportunities have I had and what haven’t I been able to do?’” Charlie remembers. “But there’s not many actors who can say they’ve had this experience working with the same people, in like a troupe for ten years. That’s so rare. So for all the experiences that you haven’t had, you’ve had that.”
Charlie’s older sister Levi owns the complete box set of Friends. A series that, like her brother’s, brought its cast back together for a full decade. A couple of years back, Charlie met Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox together, in a surreal moment where the trio remarked upon their respective shows’ imprint on the zeitgeist. It was one of the perks that comes with being a series regular on one of the most successful shows in history, and soon, he’ll experience another one, uniting his real family with his Stranger Things family at the London premiere of the show’s final season. It’s a full-circle moment for the boy who used to take a three-hour train ride to perch on the Trafalgar Square horses, trying to catch a glimpse of a red carpet.
“We didn’t have a lot of money, so we’d just find shit to do and run around London, and that was one thing we’d do just to pass time,” Charlie says. “I think [my younger self] would be fucking blown away.”
After filming wrapped, Charlie left Cabbagetown, Atlanta, for his hometown of Bridlington, a small seaside town in east Yorkshire. Christmas was coming, which also meant that Charlie, as a February baby, would soon farewell his 30th year. Levi was the first to ask the question Charlie will surely hear again and again over the coming weeks as Stranger Things comes to a close forever: ‘How does it feel?’
“I never thought I’d be playing Jonathan for 10 years…but there are no regrets. If I’m known just for Jonathan, which I probably will be for the rest of my life, that’s fine. That’s a really nice person to be remembered as.”
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Photography by Shane McCauley
Styling by Oretta Corbelli
Words by Beatrice Hazlehurst
Grooming by Colleen Dominique at The Wall Group
On-set Producer Krystal Collier
Fashion Assistant Allegra Gargiulo
Videography by Robert Marrero