While Marvel fans still don’t know exactly who Joe Locke is playing in Agatha All Along—officially his character’s name is “Teen,” though speculation has narrowed it down a lot more than that—the Heartstopper breakout is very confident about what he’s bringing to the table in the WandaVision spin-off. In a new interview, he talked about playing a queer character in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and what it means to him both personally and professionally.
Speaking to Variety, Locke says Agatha All Along has made him less concerned about being typecast as a gay character, because the role he has is so complex and multi-faceted. “The show never shies away from his queerness, but it’s not a defining feature of his character,” he told the trade. “It’s just one layer of him as a person.”
Elsewhere in the article, Agatha Harkness herself, Kathryn Hahn, recalls how soon after she started working with Locke she was impressed with his sense of self. “He corrected me early on, because I said, ‘’hese witches and this gorgeous wizard,’” she recalled to Variety. “And he was like, ‘No, we’re all witches.’ That really stuck with me.”
Though Locke considers being in a Marvel series “the most pinch me thing,” he’s also ready to face naysayers—even fellow members of the LGBTQ+ community—who have taken from the Agatha All Along trailers that his performance as “Teen” (or whoever he ends up being) will be a “campy gay stereotype.” He explained why that didn’t sit right with him.
“It really annoyed me because I was like, ‘You can’t ask for authentic casting and then be upset if you have a camp character’ … I’m fully aware that the Marvel fandom is far less nice than the Heartstopper fandom,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of people that just hate everything about the character and everything about what I’ve done with it, and I just have to be OK with that.”
And if Agatha All Along includes musical numbers, as has been rumored, Locke’s theatrical talents will come in extra handy; earlier this year, he starred as Tobias Ragg—following Stranger Things‘ Gaten Matarazzo—in the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Agatha All Along, which also stars Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, Patti LuPone, Debra Jo Rupp, Emma Caulfield Ford, and Aubrey Plaza, was created by Jac Schaeffer (Black Widow, WandaVision). It will run a total of nine episode, and will debut with a two-episode premiere September 18 on Disney+.
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