Exclusive Interview: Pop Culturalist Chats with Locke & Key’s Connor Jessup

Actor-filmmaker Connor Jessup grew up on the set of projects like The Saddle Club and Falling Skies. Those experiences shaped him as a man and storyteller, fueling his drive to create his own narratives. He cofounded Big & Quiet Pictures with longtime friend Ashley Shields-Muir in 2014. Together, their short films have made their way through major festivals, including Toronto, Palm Springs, and Clermont-Ferrand.

In 2020, he made his return to television in Netflix’s sci-fi supernatural drama Locke & Key. Pop Culturalist caught up with Connor to chat about the series—already renewed for a second season—and his career.

Career

PC: You’re an actor, director, editor, producer, and writer. How did you discover your passion for storytelling and the arts?
Connor: I wish there was a single sexy answer for that. Honestly, it happened over a period of time. When I was a kid, I didn’t really do much. I didn’t have a lot of outlets for the energy that every kid has. I didn’t play sports. I wasn’t in any clubs. I just had a lot of built-up steam. I ended up in a drama group, and one thing led to another and I started acting. Then as my career as an actor started to develop and grow a bit, I started really falling head over heels for movies. One thing complemented the other. There wasn’t a single origin point, but I’m very grateful for it all. It’s also the people. You need people who inspire you, push you, and make you want to try new things and support you. It’s become my entire life. I don’t know anything else.

PC: Who or what’s had the biggest influence on your career?
Connor: Wow. Two people leap to mind. Obviously my mom is one. She was never really that into the idea. She was never a stage mom. But when I was ten, I was begging for her to help me become an actor. I had a really strong speech impediment at the time, and I absolutely refused to work on it and fix it. Honestly, I didn’t even hear it. She had been pushing me for a long time to take it seriously. She saw this sudden desire to be an actor as an opportunity. She signed a devil’s bargain with me that if I agreed to fix my Rs and my Ls, she would help me become an actor. I’m still taking her up on that. When I was thirteen, I was in Australia working. She took time off her job and went with me. I literally wouldn’t be able to do anything without her.

The other is my very best friend in the whole world, Ashley Shields-Muir. I was on the show called Falling Skies for years. She started on that show as a script coordinator. Over the course of the series, she got promoted, and by the end, she was a producer on the show. She’s my closest friend in the world, and we have a company together. She produced all the movies that I’ve made. She’s my platonic life partner. She’s everything to me. I can’t function without her.

PC: How has your work behind the scenes impacted the work that you do onscreen and vice versa?
Connor: I spent years growing up on set, meeting and being inspired by people. So much of what I learned and inspiration that I carried from that was what fueled my desire to make things, and it still does. Most of the people that I’ve been lucky to work with on my own stuff have come through my experience acting. It really has been one big ecosystem. Since I started directing, it’s made me more patient as an actor. When I was seventeen or eighteen and acting, I wanted every job to be everything. I wanted to get everything that I needed out of every single job that I had. Part of being an actor is not that. Part of being an actor is you’re part of someone else’s set and you’re part of someone else’s vision and their world. In a way, you’re coming into the middle of it and leaving before it’s finished.

You’re serving a function. Once I started to make my own stuff, I became way more comfortable and more excited about what it is to be an actor, which is more limited. It’s nice to be able to go back and forth from my own stuff, which is small, cheap, and difficult, and the responsibility is one hundred percent your own, to something like Locke & Key, where you don’t have to worry about funding, visual effects, editing, and writing. You come in in the middle. You have fun and then you leave before it gets really hard.

Locke & Key

PC: You’re currently starring in the supernatural drama Locke & Key on Netflix. Tell us about the series and your character.
Connor: Locke & Key is a fantasy-adventure-mystery about the three Locke siblings and their mom, who, after the violent death of their father, move across the country to his ancestral home on the East Coast. They find out that it’s full of these bizarre magic keys that all have different powers and that are linked in weird ways to their father’s death. They get embroiled in this world of magic and intrigue.

It’s based on a very popular comic series by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. I play the eldest sibling, Tyler Locke. All three of these kids are dealing with the loss of their dad in different ways. Tyler has internalized it. Before all of this happened, he was very confident and comfortable. He was popular, athletic, and knew who he was. He feels okay in his own body, and after the death of his father, all of that goes out the window.

He suddenly feels askew, broken, and wrong. All his relationships aren’t working right. He can’t say the right thing. Everything is awkward and uncomfortable. His journey over the course of this season is trying to figure out how to become an adult while dealing with all the trauma. On one hand, it’s a fun, magical adventure, and on the other hand, it’s a well-crafted, moving story about what it means to grow up with grief.

PC: Locke & Key marks your return to television. What was it about this particular project and script that resonated with you?
Connor: I got the script at a time when I’d been working on my own stuff for a while. I was frustrated with myself. I was trying to write, and it’s a very insular process. You feel isolated; you feel everything is hard and all the responsibility is yours. Writing is hard, and like you said, it’s been a while since I have been a part of something bigger. I’d been in this little indie bubble for a while.

This script came along and suddenly I read it and I had so much fun reading the first couple of scripts. It awakened something inside of me. I was like, “It would be nice to just have fun. It’d be nice to have to work on something that other people will have so much fun watching.”

When I originally started acting at ten or eleven, I worshipped Harry Potter and Narnia. All I wanted was to go through a door into a magical world. That’s literally what this is. It reminded me of eleven-year-old Connor.

PC: You touched upon this a bit already. When we first meet Tyler, he’s dealing with that trauma of losing his father and feeling the pressure to step into his father’s shoes. How did you prepare to tackle the emotional journey that Tyler undergoes throughout the first season?
Connor: What Tyler is dealing with is what it means to grow up and what it means to look backwards and feel like you used to understand something. You used to know what was going on, and now you don’t. You once had things under control, and now you don’t. You feel adrift in your own life, so much so that you don’t have the tools to deal with it or express what you’re feeling. That’s really the core of what Tyler’s going through. Everyone knows what that’s like. I know what that’s like. I’m a bit older now, but seventeen wasn’t too long ago. I remember what it’s like to be seventeen. So much of what Tyler is feeling I understood, and hopefully, other people will too.

PC: While there are a lot of similarities between Tyler in the series and Tyler in the graphic novel, there are also a lot of differences. As an actor, does that create more space for you to shape the character?
Connor: Yeah! One of the nice things about the show was I read a couple of our scripts first and then I went back to the comics. This version of the show is its third iteration. It existed first as a Fox pilot a decade ago. Then it was a Hulu pilot. Then it went over to Netflix and was recast and rewritten. So it morphed a lot.

I went into it knowing that this was an adaptation of the story. But an adaptation in the true sense where they were hoping to be loyal to essential themes and the spirit, but they weren’t trying to do a panel-by-panel recreation of it. In a lot of ways, the pilot is remixed and reconfigured, and you arrive at familiar things in new ways.

We lean more heavily on the fantasy aspect. A lot of the characters bear a resemblance to the comic version, but they are radically reconfigured, like Tyler and Nina. Knowing that going in, it does give you a lot of freedom because you feel you can be inspired by the beautiful work that Joe and Gabriel did with this character in the comic, but you don’t feel you have to do an imitation of it.

PC: Like you said earlier, this series is grounded in reality. Which of Tyler’s relationships was your favorite to explore and why?
Connor: Emilia Jones plays Kinsey. Tyler and Kinsey’s relationship is really the central one in his life in the first season. The emotional drama over the course of the season is built around that relationship. For most of the season, they can’t get along. They used to have a really healthy relationship, and now everything they do pisses the other one off. They disagree about everything. They disagree about life in general. They disagree very actively about what to do with these keys. They’re at odds. There’s this deep history of having so much love for each other, and there’s no one Tyler wants to be there for and wants to prove himself to more than Kinsey.

The fact that he can’t and doesn’t know how is so hard for him. I really care about that relationship. It also helps that I love Emilia so much. She’s a beautiful person. I thought I was going to go into the show and be the older brother. Emilia was seventeen when we shot, and Jackson [Robert Scott] was ten. I thought I was going to be the older one who welcomed everyone in. It turned out that they were way more sophisticated, mature, capable, and talented than I was. Every day, I would show up to work with Emilia and Jackson only to be overwhelmed by how much better they were than me. It quickly became a game of catch-up. I really adore them so much.

PC: Now that you’ve been binge-read the entire series, where do you hope Season 2 goes?
Connor: Anyone who knows the comics knows that the way that we end Season 1 sets us on a trajectory that’s very different from the comic. That means to some extent we have to find our own way going forward. I’m sure there will be elements, stories, and characters from the comics that weave in, but a large amount of our plot going forward I think has to be original. That’s really exciting. I think that’s exciting to Joe and Gabriel as well. We’ll get to explore new territory with all these familiar characters.

For example, one thing that I find really intriguing about our show and one possibility that’s never really explored in the comics is that when people become adults, they start to forget magic. They can’t see it; they can’t remember it; they can’t process it. In the comics, that’s not really a thing that they have to deal with because it takes place in a very narrow period of time. But in our show, if we go longer, these characters will get older. Tyler is seventeen in this one. Going forward, he turns eighteen—he becomes an adult. I’d be very interested in seeing how our writers deal with the idea of Tyler and then Kinsey and all these characters in a Narnia way forgetting what happened.

Pop Culturalist Speed Round

PC: Guilty pleasure TV show?
Connor: Too many. I have so many shows that I watch that I shouldn’t be watching. I’m devoted to The Bachelor, 90 Day Fiancé, The Circle—all the bad reality shows I’m very, very there for. I don’t know if you can call it a guilty pleasure if it takes up eighty percent of my life.

PC: Favorite book?
Connor: That’s so hard. It changes all the time. A book that was really important to me when I was a bit younger was Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson, a brilliant Canadian poet. All of her writing is astonishing, but she wrote what she calls a novel in verse, a reinterpretation of a classical myth, but it’s a beautiful book about queer coming of age called Autobiography of Red. It really means a lot to me.

PC: Favorite play or musical?
Connor: To be honest, I don’t see too many musicals. When I was twelve, I went to an all-boys school. In the classical Shakespearean tradition, I played the part of Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. It was still to this day really the only proper play that I’ve ever done. Weirdly, no matter how much theater you see, when I think about theater now, I still think about me in a dress with a little circlet on my head playing Lady Macbeth.

PC: A band or artist that fans would be surprised to learn is on your playlist?
Connor: I have the entire Steven Universe soundtrack on my Spotify playlist.

PC: Since we’re talking about Locke & Key, which key would you want?
Connor: I feel like the key that has the most potential is the ghost key. I feel we underuse it in our show. It lets you fly, it turns you invisible, and it lets you speak to the dead. The most practical key to use in my life would be the plant key. I have a garden and I have whatever is the opposite of a green thumb. I kill everything I touch. I feel the plant key would help me on a day-to-day basis.

PC: Who would play you in the story of your life?
Connor: This is a good one. My dog, Crouton, has a deep understanding of my daily behavior. First of all, she sees everything, and she has star power that I don’t have. I feel she could bring a depth to the depiction.

To keep up with Connor, follow him on Twitter and Instagram. Binge-watch Season 1 of Locke & Key on Netflix today.

Photo Credit: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix