Kit Connor acts with his face before his lines, and his best moments are the ones where a director holds on him while he works something out. Heartstopper gave him that; the parts since have mostly asked him to be one of a crowd.
Fi1m perspective
The scene is a form room in the first episode of Heartstopper (2022). Nick Nelson's hand lands near Charlie Spring's on the desk, and Alice Oseman's show draws a spray of little animated sparks between them. The drawing ought to be too much. It is not, because Kit Connor's face is doing two things at once, pleased and alarmed, and the sparks only say what he cannot. We expected to find it twee and instead we sat grinning at the television like fools. That is Connor's method: he does the working out on his face, in real time, and lets the script catch up.
He had been working for a decade by then: a child part in 2013, the lead in Get Santa (2014), the teenage Elton John in Rocketman (2019), stage work in between. None of it prepared anyone for how completely Nick Nelson would define him. The series ran from 2022 to 2024 and closes with a 2026 film on which he is also an executive producer. A rugby player working something out about himself, opposite Joe Locke, rewards exactly what he can do, which is think visibly and slowly while other people talk.
Since then he has, by his own account, been trying to get away from it. "From an acting perspective, the goal is always to stretch yourself and do completely different things," he said in 2025, and the choices bear that out. He voiced the gosling Brightbill in Chris Sanders's The Wild Robot (2024), the runt whose flying lessons are a long run of failures. He played Romeo on Broadway in 2024 opposite Rachel Zegler. And in Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza's Warfare (2025) he is Tommy, one of a platoon we know only by their jobs and their fear.
The stretching has so far cost him the close-up. The Wild Robot is the warmest film DreamWorks has made in years, but it belongs to Lupita Nyong'o, and it was her robot on the shore that moved us. Warfare is the most convincing combat we have sat through in years; it is built on D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Will Poulter, and it has no interest in anyone's face for longer than a second. Not everyone who saw the Romeo thought he had left Nick Nelson behind on that desk. An actor whose best tool is a slow, readable face needs directors who will wait for it. A firefight will not, and an animated gosling has someone else's face.
He is booked for an X-Men film in 2028, which will be another crowd. We would rather see him in a small room with a script that gives him nothing to say for a minute and a camera that does not move. That is where we first believed him, and he has not been back.
Biography
Kit Sebastian Connor is an English actor. Born on 8 March 2004 in Croydon, London, he began acting as a child and appeared in films including Mr. Holmes (2015), Rocketman (2019) as Older Reggie, and Little Joe (2019).
Connor gained recognition for his role as Nick Nelson in the Netflix series Heartstopper (2022–2024) and its concluding film Heartstopper Forever (2026). He voiced Brightbill in the animated film The Wild Robot (2024) and played Tommy in the war film Warfare (2025). He also starred as Romeo in a 2024 Broadway production of Romeo & Juliet.
His performances have earned awards including a Children's and Family Emmy Award for Heartstopper, a Theatre World Award for Romeo & Juliet, and a British Independent Film Award for the ensemble of Warfare. He received an Annie Award nomination for The Wild Robot.
