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.”

Blazer, $895, and pants, $695, by Helmut Lang / Sweater, $165, and shirt, $145, from Stock Vintage / Shoes, $145, by Sperry / Socks, $60, by Falke

“He works from his heart, which is as big as a planet.” —Winona Ryder

Heaton’s familiarity with our nation’s network of unoccupied mental hospitals is thanks in part to his having caught—and continuing to ride—two enormous, fan-driven waves in Stranger Things and the X-Men spin-off. This country’s film and television viewers, it seems, want nothing more than to watch an unending series of comic-book-derived and -adjacent properties starring attractive young people. Heaton, 26 and possessing both a shadowy allure and a glorious head of hair he keeps carefully mussed, can credit that desire for much of his success.

His characters seem to be conscious of their darker parts—and eager to hide them. On Stranger Things, he plays Jonathan Byers, the initially awkward, increasingly heroic older brother of one of the show’s starring gang of kids. The role, cocreator Matt Duffer tells me, required a difficult mix for a young actor: cool, but not quite aware of it: “In a lot of ways, he's very similar to Jonathan in that he's a really cool guy, but he's got an anxious, sensitive quality,” he says. “[Charlie is] a very soulful person. He's, like, as far as you can get from a douchebag. That's hard to find.” And Heaton’s approach feels lived-in, imbued with a hesitant, wounded quality. “He works from his heart, which is as big as a planet,” his costar—and onscreen mother—Winona Ryder explains in an email.