“There was just this beautiful openness”: Behind the scenes of the hottest season yet of Heartstopper | TV

IAt a disused school in Buckinghamshire, the hallways littered with gray lockers have been painted a bright blue. Flowers bloom on the floors of long-abandoned classrooms and rainbow handprints are drawn all over the windows.

This is the set of Heartstopper, the hit Netflix series that follows a group of mostly LGBTQ+ friends as they navigate the rocky terrain of teenage relationships. Each living space is part of its creator Alice Oseman's effort to adapt to the vivid images of the graphic novels from which the TV show was adapted. They're so vibrant that sometimes it feels like the animated sparks you see on screen when characters fall in love are going to burst out at any moment.

Then why do I have a massive knot in my stomach?

I can't do it. On the one hand, spending time with the show's LGBTQ+ team is a very delightful experience. The cast are close, many of them living in the same apartment blocks during filming and taking turns preparing dinner. “I don’t know how we do it,” says Joe Locke – who plays one of the two main roles alongside his film friend Kit Connor. “We'll spend 12 hours a day together and still spend the next five hours cooking each other dinner.”

Last night, Tobie Donovan, who plays obsessive book reader Isaac, made hamburgers and homemade chips. Tonight, William Gao, the actor behind the hopelessly in love teenager Tao, is cooking zucchini noodles. “You don't realize it until you get another job and think, 'Oh, wow, this is so unique,'” says Gao. “Long may the wine nights of Come Dine With Me continue.”

Meeting Oseman isn't even remotely nerve-wracking. She's incredibly accessible, down-to-earth and a tour de force – she wrote the books the series is based on and all the scripts for the adaptation, despite never having worked in television before. She is on set most days and is involved in all aspects of production, from the characters' clothing to their individual bedrooms, which are assembled, set up and filmed flat at the school. If any of the actors have a question about their character, they can ask her on set or just send her a WhatsApp. “She always has the answer to any question you might have, and she makes us feel very comfortable,” Locke says.

Oseman keeps her fan base happy by making sure the graphic novels and the series are in sync. Pages of the original hang on the wall of a production office so the team can work out the camera angles they can reproduce, which will then be noticed and shared by fans. In addition to the scripts, the actors also receive the books so that they can learn more about their characters, although not for the third season because the books were not yet fully drawn. (“There was a brief period where I was literally filming the same story in two different versions at the same time,” Oseman says.)

Perhaps the reason for my discomfort lies in the new direction of the third season of Heartstopper. The first two followed many of the characters as they realized their LGBTQ+ identities and explored their feelings for each other. The third season is darker: Charlie (Locke) suffers from mental health issues and an eating disorder, while the more vulnerable Nick (Connor) feels helpless in the face of his partner's problems.

“He doesn’t know how to help Charlie,” says Connor. “And that’s a big deal that he has to come to terms with that. He doesn't know if it's going to be okay.” So far, Connor believes, Nick has always been mature and always knows what to say, “but it makes it even more interesting to get to a point where Nick and Charlie are with something are confronted with something they don’t even know how to talk about.”

The message that comes through clearly is that love and goodwill are not enough to help Charlie: he needs medical professionals. In the books, this message comes from Nick's mother, played in the series by Olivia Colman, but since the actor is unavailable, it comes from Aunt Diane, played by Hayley Atwell. What follows is a break from the series' traditional style and reflects the severity of Charlie's mental health journey. “As a teenager, I watched and read a lot of stories about characters with mental illness,” says Oseman, “and often there is a narrative that a mentally ill character falls in love or finds this person who solves all their problems.” I always felt like that wasn't realistic.

“Especially for a teenager like Nick, who is literally a 16-year-old boy at this point in the story. He's incapable of knowing exactly what to do when his friend is clearly suffering from a pretty serious mental illness…Love is wonderful, but it doesn't solve all your problems.”

Season three isn't a total gear change. Still drawing on a relatable, hopeful exploration of identity, the show delves into Issac's asexuality and aromanticism — the feeling of having little to no romantic attraction — and the misunderstandings others can have about it. “[Oseman] “writes about the blossoming maturity of young people in a way that feels relatable,” says Patrick Walters, executive producer of the series. “And it captures the little moments that are truly powerful for young people.”

The main characters navigate sex for the first time, including Elle (Yasmin Finney), who is a young trans woman exploring sex with her boyfriend Tao. And as you'd expect from Heartstopper, it's done in a typically thoughtful and insightful way. “I think it’s complex for them,” Finney says. “It's actually always complex for trans people because you have gender dysphoria that you have to struggle with and sometimes you don't necessarily feel comfortable sharing sexual interactions with a partner. And I think that really shows in this season – it's more about being comfortable with someone, but Tao and Elle have been best friends for so many years.”

“I’m so glad we’re telling this part of her story,” says Gao. “And we put a lot of work into discussing it first.” Rehearsals included discussions with the team – including an intimacy director – about how to approach it properly. “We said, 'Yaz, tell us about your experience' and she led the conversation, which was really inspiring. That meant that when we got to filming, there was just this lovely openness.”

And after Elle's artwork goes viral on social media, she is invited to a radio interview about her work, but is unexpectedly cornered and asked to respond to transphobic comments. “This season we're giving a realistic sense of what she goes through when she's interviewed,” says Finney. “It's not like some shows with transgender representation where there's negativity – there's bullying or hatred. It’s more like small nuances of transphobia, something like journalism… all the stuff that I also had to experience as Yasmin.”

Bridgerton's Jonathan Bailey also makes an appearance, playing Jack Maddox, a star and author who Charlie has a crush on. His appearance came after Patrick Walters met him at Glastonbury. “He came up to me and said, 'Oh my God, Heartstopper, I love it.' He was so exuberant. And he’s such a sweet, lovely man.”

It's another beautiful story to hear. But this knot in my stomach just can't be solved. Then I'm led past a mural in the school hallway and I slowly realize why. The artwork is a huge blue wave painted on the wall. It's a classic Heartstopper image that looks like it was hand-drawn by Oseman, full of color and care. Since this is a filming location, I was told that parts of the school need to be returned to the way they were before. The murals are whitewashed, the light lockers are painted gray. (“I was just walking down the hallway… and I thought, 'This is so sad!' Heartstopper was literally painted away,” Oseman later recalled.)

Then it hits me. This is the first school I have attended since leaving my own school 20 years ago. It was a school I desperately wanted to forget after two years of abuse, homophobia, and belittlement from students and, in retrospect, sometimes even teachers. The first series of Heartstopper caused me to confront my own past and I realized that everything could have been better. With bad old memories replaying through my mind, I sent a letter to my school asking what had changed. I received a response emphasizing a zero-tolerance policy on bullying, adding, “As a school and hopefully as a society, we have come a long way since 2007,” and suggested that I could drop by.

I took the chance to see firsthand what had changed, but the correspondence went nowhere. Maybe the term got in the way, I thought. But given that I'm at a school that's slowly slipping back into the grayness of my own school, one question bothers me. Is Heartstopper just a fantasy or a reflection of where we are now?

“I don’t know because I think it varies a lot,” Oseman replies. “Obviously when I was at school it was nothing like Heartstopper. But as a writer of young adult fiction, I've met many teenagers who seem to have had a fairly accepting upbringing in their school environment that feels a world away from my school life.

“Heartstopper is obviously more accepting, more ambitious and what we want all schools and queer experiences to be.”

That's what's special about this show. No matter what world we live in, it gives us hope.

Heartstopper is on Netflix October 3rd.