A viral post now claims Heartstopper star Joe Locke cheated on his reported secret boyfriend, his co-star Sebastian Croft. The man it names says the timeline is all wrong.
On the show, Sebastian played Ben, the closeted boy in a secret relationship with Joe’s Charlie. Earlier this month, insiders told The Sun the two actors had a secret romance of their own off screen, and that Joe ended it with a phone call while Sebastian was on stage in Chichester. We covered that report when it broke.
Sebastian has turned the breakup into his debut EP, The Great Forever, and he’s talked about it in interview after interview. He has never said who it was with. Joe hasn’t said anything at all.
Then this week, an X account went digging through old Instagram screenshots, and the whole story blew up again. Sebastian’s latest interview may have supplied the spark: one of his new songs, he says, is about never knowing for sure whether you were cheated on.
The Post That Lit The Fuse
On October 20, an X user posting as “ares” shared a collage of screenshots with a blunt caption: Joe had cheated on Sebastian with an adult content creator.
The post has racked up close to 25,000 likes. The “evidence” is a handful of social media crumbs: an old Instagram story Joe posted in New York with someone partly in frame, a screenshot showing Joe follows the creator on Instagram, a post Joe had liked, and photos of the two of them together.
Two days later, the same account followed up with another screenshot, a selfie of Joe with the creator captioned “Met a heartstopper”. The account claimed it dated from April 2023, before the breakup.
There’s no date anywhere on the screenshot itself. By then, though, a lot of people had already made up their minds.
Who Is The Man In The Screenshots?
The creator is Nicholas Norris, who posts as That.Gay.Guy.Nick. He makes adult content, including on OF, and according to Out, he has more than 370,000 followers on X.
He woke up on October 21 to find himself at the center of someone else’s breakup. His first reaction, in a reply to a fan, was short.
Then he went further. In a post that Out quoted before he deleted it, Nick said he and Joe did spend time together, but only after the split.
“They had broken up before we even met, we just hung out a couple times,” he wrote, calling the whole thing “a nothing burger” and telling people to “go outside and touch grass.”
The post is gone now, so Out’s copy is the only record of it. Nick hasn’t posted about it again, and neither Joe nor Sebastian has responded.
So the only person who has said anything on the record about the timeline says the breakup came first.
Team Sebastian Vs. “Leave Them Alone”
The replies split fast. Plenty of fans took Sebastian’s side on the spot, piling the cheating claim on top of the phone-call breakup as proof of how badly Joe had treated him.
Others pushed back hard. You can’t rebuild a private relationship out of follows and likes, they argued, and nobody outside it knows what happened. “It’s no one’s business but theirs,” one wrote, in reactions rounded up by Bored Panda. “We cannot know what happened. Leave them alone.”
Fair enough. A follow and a selfie with no date on it show that two men met at some point, not when.
The Song That Gave Fans Ideas
The rumor didn’t come out of nowhere, though. In a long interview with The i Paper, published October 15, Sebastian walked through the songs on The Great Forever.
One of them, Heartbreak State of Mind, is about never really knowing whether you were cheated on, and deciding to move on anyway. “That person definitely moved on very quickly,” he said, adding that he’s tired of being angry and hurt about it.
He didn’t accuse anyone, or even name anyone, and the paper itself only describes the relationship as “rumoured” to be with Joe. Fans read it as a clue anyway, and within days the screenshots were everywhere.
He also talked about the phone call. For a long time, he said, he was angry about the way it ended. What hurt more was the reason: realizing the other person had decided, in his words, “my life is more interesting when I don’t have you in it.”
His newest single, Good Light, came out the next day. By his own description, it’s about sleeping with an ex, with a tongue-in-cheek warning that nobody should try it at home.
The First Time He Lived Ben’s Story
The i Paper interview had another story in it, a much older one. Long before Heartstopper, Sebastian was outed at his boarding school near Oxford by a boy he’d been secretly seeing. He was bullied and frozen out, and he left school at 16.
He told the paper he doesn’t blame the other boy, who was getting picked on for being gay too. But he remembers it as a lonely, difficult time. The i Paper pointed out the parallel: on Heartstopper, his Ben was the secret boyfriend who hurt Charlie. In real life, Sebastian was the one who got hurt.
The show, he said, gave him back the sixth-form years he’d lost, this time surrounded by people who supported him.
Where Things Stand
Joe, 23, hasn’t addressed the cheating claims, the relationship report or anything else. Sebastian, 24, still hasn’t named his ex. The Great Forever doesn’t have a release date yet.
In the meantime, he’s still in the castle on The Celebrity Traitors, where Thursday’s episode ended with the Traitors weighing whether to murder him next.
And in an MTV UK interview last week, he admitted he’s “slightly terrified” of his digital footprint. This week, everyone was busy reading someone else’s.