With ‘Below,’ Charlie Heaton Digs Into His Next Big Sci-Fi Adventure

Charlie Heaton is fresh from a well-deserved week off. It’s been a while since he last took a break.

The 32-year-old actor wrapped up a major chapter in his life late last year with the ending of Stranger Things, the Netflix science fiction series that catapulted him and his co-stars into near overnight fame. After Stranger Things wrapped, he jumped right into the hit HBO series Industry, with a multi-episode arc on the show’s fourth season, and then he was onto his latest series, Netflix’s Below.

He’s been near-nonstop for the last year. Suffice it to say, his short break’s long overdue. “I’m really happy with where things are at,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter on a Zoom from his home in London.

On Below, Heaton stars alongside Josh Hartnett and Mackenzie Davis in the sci-fi limited series. The show, which is set in a seaside village in Newfoundland, centers around fisherman Calvin Penney (Hartnett) and his children, one of which is played by Heaton, as the town deals with a chaotic cephalopod situation.

Things came together quickly for Heaton when it came to joining the series. It was summer 2025, he’d just wrapped Stranger Things and Industry, but both had yet to be released.

“Industry was great because it was something extremely different from what I’d done with Jonathan for the last 10 years. And then this script came through,” he says. “I just whizzed through it, and I was just so intrigued. I felt like it really jumped off the page.”

The characters were well-defined and the actor found the show had a “Spielbergian warmth to it.” The show and its seaside small village locale do evoke a Jaws feeling at time. His decade spent working in sci-fi and his upbringing in his British seaside town of Bridlington had Heaton instantly intrigued.

Heaton quickly got on a Zoom with showrunner and creator Jesse McKeown and executive producer and director Jamie Childs, who were location scouting in Newfoundland at the time of the conversation. The location sealed the deal.

Wade is a particular character. He’s pivotal to the mystery unfolding in the town and an equal parts loveable and confounding misfit when compared to his two siblings. Despite sharing few similarities, Heaton had an idea of who this guy was.

“I’ve got a lot of friends who stayed around our hometown. Especially those kinds of friends, who — they’re smart, they’ve got all this energy, but it’s kind of misplaced sometimes,” the actor says.

Heaton’s time in Newfoundland also greatly informed how he played Wade. “Newfoundland culture is so rich and even though Jesse’s script is sci-fi, but it’s all kind of embedded in folklore,” he says. “It’s a love letter to everything he’d kind of witnessed while he was there in their culture and he pulled it out.”

There’s a bar in the series, Linda’s Bar, that really exists in the small town they shot in, called Town of Old. His first night in town, he took an Uber out to the spot that he described as looking more like a rundown community center from the outside than a bar. But there is a real Linda at the “timeless” spot, someone that Heaton wished he’d had the chance to meet while he was there.

The actor did become friends with the community of people at the bar and in the town. He found the people of Newfoundland to be equally excited about a Netflix show shooting in town and open to welcoming the team from the show. The fishing towns are so small, that the community members rely on one another. “They’re really good storytellers and they’re really open and very trusting. I heard somewhere that the niceness of Canadians was born in Newfoundland,” Heaton says.

The actor recalls a conversation he had with his driver, Rob, after a frustrating day on set. He slips into his onscreen Newfoundland accent to parrot the driver telling Heaton that his wife Mareen was putting dinner on the table and there was a seat for Heaton. “I ended up going out to his house and having supper and sitting with his family,” he says. “For me, that was a great example of what Newfoundland kind of culture is about.”

He adds, “That really to me set the tone for that kind of warmth you get in the beginning of the show.”

The Newfoundland accent, which his character Wade and the rest of the cast are using in the show, is hard to pin down. Heaton points out one of the most challenging parts is how much it changes from bay to bay in the area. He found it difficult at first and started with watching YouTube videos, podcasts and radio while he was still in London — he only had three weeks to get it down.

There’s a common thread among his post-Stranger Things projects, he’s been intentional about picking his projects. He didn’t expect to be doing so much after the show ended. “There is a fear that the show’s over and no one might hire you, or you might just get asked to do the same thing,” he says. “I hadn’t had a UK agent for quite a long time, so I knew that was something I wanted to explore again and try and do something UK-based.”

Heaton’s hopeful that he’ll surprise people but he’s also aiming to surprise himself with these projects. Stranger Things felt like an acting school for him — it was a comfortable and safe place for him to work and grow his craft.

The next step in that intentional journey is a role in Netflix’s upcoming Peaky Blinders sequel series, which he’s set to lead alongside Jamie Bell. “It’s one of my favorite shows on television, so of course I wanted to have a go at that,” he explains.

“Peaky is probably the most focused I’ve ever had to be on a job,” Heaton says. The actor had a respect, almost fear, for the show because of the work that people on the original have done before. He wanted to get it right as a fan of the show.

For now, Heaton’s mainly focused on something different though. He adds, “I’m kind of excited for a little bit of a pause and to just see some things come out and see how that all goes.”