For the final onscreen installment of “Heartstopper,” its creator, Alice Oseman, wanted to get cinematic.
For three TV seasons, this uplifting coming-of-age romance has followed the artsy Charlie (Joe Locke) and the sporty Nick (Kit Connor), who fall in love as they navigate a British high school. Oseman wanted the film “Heartstopper Forever,” which comes to Netflix on Friday, to feel a “little bit more elevated and mature,” she said in a recent video interview, “which is kind of in line with the fact that these characters are almost adults now.”
Like the show, the film incorporates distinctive hand-drawn doodles from Oseman’s “Heartstopper” graphic novels, with animated hearts, stars and leaves bursting across the screen to show the strength of Nick and Charlie’s feelings. But “Heartstopper Forever” also feels bigger in scale, including through a wide shot following the boys as they sprint down a pier toward the ocean at sunset, the sky striped with orange and purple clouds, before they kiss passionately in front of the harbor’s sparkling lights.
Their emotional arc in the film, which is directed by Wash Westmoreland (“Still Alice,” “Colette”), is also more mature.
A key part of “Heartstopper” has always been how Nick and Charlie “make each other stronger and more confident,” Oseman said. The pair must draw on this support in “Heartstopper Forever” as they grapple with mental health issues and increasingly grown-up challenges. As they approach the end of their time at school together, Nick is getting ready for university, and Charlie, whom a friend once called “a borderline outcast,” is campaigning to be the leader of his high school class. (We also see them having more sex than in the preceding seasons.)
Locke, who plays Charlie, said that a lot of the film was about the two characters’ “figuring out how, instead of being one whole circle together, they can be like a Venn diagram where they have their own things in their own lives, but also fit together.”
The sweetness of the pair’s relationship has helped “Heartstopper” become a phenomenon and has earned the show (and the graphic novels it was based on) a loyal fan base over the years. Each season of “Heartstopper” amassed over 10 million views and made the Netflix Top 10, a list of the service’s most watched shows in a given week, in dozens of countries, according to Netflix data.
Over the last several years, the cast has also grown up along with the characters. Locke, who was 17 when he was cast, said in a recent video interview that the show had “changed my life in pretty much every way.” Although he didn’t expect to be able to make it as an actor before the show, he has since starred in the Marvel show “Agatha All Along” and has several upcoming movies.
Of the early seasons, Locke said, “I was almost playing a version of myself.” But as both the character and the actor have grown up, Locke has stopped seeing Charlie as “such an extension of myself — it almost feels like siblings that grow up and just go in different paths,” he said.
When “Heartstopper” premiered in April 2022, the story lines for teenage L.G.B.T.Q. characters on popular shows like “Euphoria” often focused on risky sex and shocking behavior. Many queer love stories told on screens big and small have ended in tragedy.
But Oseman’s career started in young adult fiction, where “even at that time, there was a wide range of uplifting, positive, happy queer stories,” the writer said. She said she was surprised when TV viewers praised Season 1 of “Heartstopper” for “doing something quite different to what was currently out there” onscreen.
Today, as other queer love stories with happier endings like “Heated Rivalry” have become wildly popular, “it’s nice to see romance have a little bit of a moment,” Oseman said.
“Maybe that’s what people want at the moment,” she added, “when the world is so awful.”
Oseman pointed out that in both Britain and the United States, legal decisions have restricted transgender people’s access to bathrooms, medical care and sports. But the “Heartstopper” friend group has always represented a kaleidoscope of gender and sexual orientations, and Locke said that he was “incredibly proud that as the political landscape of the world has changed since the show began, the show hasn’t changed with that and has maintained its ethos,” which he described as showing a “positive portrayal of queerness and queer people.”
Last year, several weeks after Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that transgender women did not fall within the legal definition of women under the country’s equality legislation, the show’s cast and crew shot scenes involving a transgender Pride march for “Heartstopper Forever.” Nick, Charlie and their friends attend partly to support Elle (Yasmin Finney), who used to attend their all-boys school but transfers to the sister school, where she makes friends with Tara (Corinna Brown).
Brown said in a recent video interview that the current political climate around transgender rights had made scenes like the march “so political,” a difference from story lines in earlier seasons. Shooting the exuberant parade through a picturesque English town was “lovely,” Brown said, but “watching it back was hard.”
In a stirring monologue before the march, Elle says: “The world hates me right now. The government is taking away my rights and everything we fought for.” Closing her eyes and shaking her head, she adds: “I just want to be myself. To be free. To be happy.”
Oseman has spent a decade telling these characters’ stories in increasing depth, and she said it was “surreal” to be bringing “Heartstopper” to a close both onscreen and on the page. (The sixth and final volume of the graphic novel came out this month.)
“I’m aware that probably none of my work will ever reach this level of success again,” she said, “and that is a really strange thing to be facing, but it’s also kind of freeing, in a way.”
As for Nick and Charlie, viewers will have to imagine their grown-up relationship milestones, the writer said, including a possible wedding or getting a dog together.
But Oseman sees them staying together through college and beyond: “This is a romance story at the end of the day, and we want them to have their happily ever after.”