Charlie Heaton is still a little shocked it turned out like this. Or if he is not shocked—if, as I suspect, some part of him always knew he would wind up famous—he is at least surprised that it all happened so quickly. “I had this crazy trajectory,” he says. “I went from literally living in a hostel in L.A. at the beginning of 2015 to shooting
Stranger Things at the end of 2015.”
As you might imagine, Heaton no longer lives in a hostel, but he has spent a surprising amount of time in creepy places: the shuttered medical facilities that speckle America, haunted little polyps in states with compelling tax breaks for filmmakers. “We shot just outside Boston, in an old abandoned mental institute,” he says over breakfast in New York in his reedy, crackly British accent. Heaton is talking about
The New Mutants, the long-delayed X-Men film he shot way back in 2017, but he’s riffing on what he’s learned about America too. “You have so many weird mental institutions,” he says with a chuckle, including the one that doubles as the fictional Hawkins National Laboratory he frequents on the set of
Stranger Things, “that you just push people in, it seems.”
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