Note: This story contains spoilers from the “Heartstopper” Season 3 finale.
After hinting at some warning signs in the first two seasons, “Heartstopper” Season 3 dives headfirst into Charlie’s mental health struggles and eating disorder as Alice Oseman crafted his crisis to become the “main topic” of the season.
“I wanted to show the whole journey for Charlie,” Oseman told TheWrap. “I wanted to see how and why his eating disorder gets a lot worse, but then also how he gets out of that place as well, and how he takes those steps towards recovery.”
As Charlie (Joe Locke) comes to terms to terms with his eating disorder, and begins to seek help — at first from Nick (Kit Connor), then his parents and eventually an in-patient care facility — Nick’s goes on what Oseman calls a “parallel” journey as he struggles to support Charlie, and faces his own fears as he is physically parted with Charlie during his recovery.
“The sort of expectation is that … Nick can fix everything just by being in love with Charlie, but … that’s not realistic,” Oseman said. Nick just can’t fix this situation, and that causes him a lot of anxiety because he wants to fix the situation, but he just can’t. He has to learn that he can support but he can’t just fix everything for Charlie.”
With the end of Season 3 seeing Nick and a handful of their friends thinking about university, Oseman shared her hopes for a Season 4 greenlightas she reiterated her goal to have a four-season arc for “Heartstopper,” saying “I think one more would finish the story.”
“We’ve got volume six of the comics, which I’m currently working on at the moment,” Oseman said. “We don’t know yet if we will have a fourth season, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed, just to get to close the story and conclude everyone’s storylines.”
Below, Oseman breaks down how she crafted intimate moments between both Nick and Charlie and Elle and Tao, spotlit transphobia and less-than-impactful sex ed and reveals the big questions to be tackled next season.
TheWrap: We see the lead up to Charlie’s mental health breakdown in Episodes 1-3, and Episode 4 gives a recap of what’s happened since Charlie admitted he had an eating disorder. Why did you want to tell this part of the story in this way?
Alice Oseman: We’re staying very close to what the story is in the graphic novels. In volume four of the graphic novels, the darkest period of Charlie’s mental health journey is shown through journal entries, where it’s sort of a little bit montagey, and we go through that three-month period just by reading their journal entries and seeing little snippets of the scenes. So the challenge was, how do I turn that into something for the screen? It turns out it works in a very similar way … they are still journal entries, but we’re hearing them as like monologs narration, which we’ve never done before … We’ve never had any narration in the show before, and I think because it is such a serious moment in the story, it actually works really well to do something quite unexpected and different.
This season sees both Nick and Charlie — and Elle and Tao — have sex for the first time. How did you want to craft those moments?
We look at sex in “Heartstopper” in a very emotional way. It’s really focused on the emotional questions, “how do I know if I’m ready? Is it going to be really awkward and embarrassing?” — the typical teenage worries and fears that you might have around having sex for the first time.
It interlinks with Charlie’s story as well. Charlie has an eating disorder, and as part of that, he has some body image issues, and he’s really worried about taking his shirt off in front of Nick, and so that creates a bit of an obstacle for them in terms of intimacy. Similarly, we also explore Elle’s experience of gender dysphoria, and that how that might affect her wanting to be intimate with Tao … things just aren’t so simple for each of those couples. We really delve into what the characters are feeling and but things work out in the end, as always in “Heartstopper.”
Elle is such a joyful character but the weigh of the world comes crashing when she’s asked transphobic questions during the radio interview and experiences gender dysphoria. How did you want to address this reality for her while still maintaining her joy?
We haven’t really looked at Elle’s experience as a trans woman at all in the show thus far. Approaching season three, me and Yas Finney both felt that we wanted to show the harder, more realistic parts of being a trans young person in the U.K. especially, and part of that was Elle’s experience of gender dysphoria, really getting into how that affects her on a day-to-day basis, but also looking at the sort of wider culture of transphobia that is so present, particularly in the U.K. From my experience, we live in a country that has really, really extreme levels of transphobia in the media every single day. Elle just wants to be a normal girl who’s going to school and hanging out with her friends and doing art, but she can’t, because she lives in this culture where it’s impossible to ignore the amount of hate and scrutiny and discussion about her community. Hopefully, it will be sort of enlightening to people, and something that we haven’t really seen a lot of on on TV before.
Episode 7 shows a sex ed class, which the kids joke about not being very impactful. Why did you want to depict sex ed in this manner?
In terms of the sex ed class, it’s not helpful at all for anyone, which is very representative of my sex ed that I had when I was at school, where you were just taught the absolute basics with really no helpful information, particularly regarding the emotions of it all. I think that’s something, definitely in the U.K., that a lot of people will be able to relate to.
The characters also define their own version of what sex means to them. How did you want to approach that subject?
That’s something that I wanted there to be a conversation about, because I think it’s particularly relevant for queer people. Sex shouldn’t just be defined by penetrative sex. It can be all kinds of things. Some people never want to have penetrative sex, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not having sex with their partner. That’s not really taught to young people at all, and you very rarely see examples of that in the media, so I thought that would be a really interesting and hopefully helpful and enlightening conversation to show.
The rest of the group – Darcy, Imogen, etc. — is continuing to discover things about themselves as well. How did you want to model some of these difficult combos?
That’s one of the key aspects of “Heartstopper” — that everyone communicates when there are difficult things going on, whatever it may be, if someone’s going through something in their own life, or if there’s a problem between characters, the characters will eventually at least have a conversation about it. A lot of problems can be solved by a conversation, and that’s something that I really love to write, just characters being honest about their feelings and expressing themselves and being truthful and sincere. It’s refreshing and hopefully will help people just feel that they can express themselves [and] express their feelings, whatever those feelings are. I think that’s really important for all kinds of relationships, whether it’s romantic or platonic.
It’s very clear choosing universities is next up for Nick and some of the friends. How would that take shape next season and what else would you want to explore next season?
Going by what I’m doing in volume six — obviously … it would be very based on that — we know from the end of Season 3 that Nick is hoping to go to university that’s quite far away from where Charlie is, and that will mean they’re not going to be able to see each other every day. It’s gonna be a really big change in their relationship. They have to sort of come to terms with that — that their relationship is about to change in a really big way, and they’re gonna be saying goodbye to their school life together — the end of a really big chapter for them. It will be a lot about each of them feeling confident in their relationship, that they can deal with that change, and also feeling confident in themselves, that they will be okay on their own as well. I think that’s really important.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“Heartstopper” Seasons 1-3 are now streaming on Netflix.
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