Charlie Heaton: From Stranger Things to Below and Peaky Blinders

For nine years Charlie Heaton was the boy with the camera and the bad haircut, the brother who always seemed to be driving somewhere in the rain. Hawkins is finished now, and the strange thing is how little he has slowed down. On October 8, 2026 Netflix released Below, a six-part sea-monster thriller with Heaton opposite Josh Hartnett, and by then he had already turned up in HBO’s Industry and been cast as a Shelby. Here is where he came from, what is true about his life, and where he goes next.

Bridlington, drums and a London move at 16

Charles Ross Heaton was born in Leeds on 6 February 1994, which makes him 32, and he grew up with his mother on a council estate in Bridlington, on the Yorkshire coast. At 16 he moved to London, and acting was not the plan: he played drums, first in the noise-rock band Comanechi, later in the psychedelic group Half Loon. The folk band Skinny Lister even wrote a 2016 song about him, called, with admirable economy, “Charlie”.

The screen work started small. In 2015 he did the British apprenticeship that every Yorkshire actor seems to serve: a guest role in DCI Banks, another in Vera, and a turn in Casualty. I like that this part of the story is so unglamorous. Hollywood loves a discovery myth; the truth is a drummer who took the parts that were going.

Jonathan Byers, 2016 to 2025

Then came Stranger Things, and Jonathan Byers: the older brother with the darkroom, the mixtapes and the permanent look of a man carrying everyone else’s worries. Heaton played him in 34 episodes across all five seasons. The final season arrived in three parts, on November 26 and December 25, 2025, with the finale on December 31 in the Americas (New Year’s Day everywhere else, which is one way to start a year).

Talking to Extra this month, he summed up the decade in a sentence: “Mainly, ‘Stranger Things’ has been my education on a film set, you know.” My read is that Jonathan was always a harder part than he looked. Quiet characters get written off as furniture; he made the quiet look like it cost something.

The films, and one correction

The show opened doors, and he walked through several at once: the thriller Shut In and the indie drama As You Are in 2016, Marrowbone in 2017, then The New Mutants, where he played Sam Guthrie, better known as Cannonball, in the long-delayed 2020 release. In 2021 he joined Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II. Most recently he starred opposite Al Pacino in Billy Knight, Alec Griffen Roth’s debut, which premiered at the Rhode Island International Film Festival in August 2025.

A correction is owed here. Earlier versions of this page said Heaton starred with Millie Bobby Brown in Enola Holmes as Lord Tewkesbury. He did not: that role belongs to Louis Partridge. Their real collaboration is the one fans already know, nine years of Stranger Things. I would rather fix it in public than leave a wrong credit on his page.

Natalia Dyer, his son and what is actually known

Heaton and Natalia Dyer, who played Nancy Wheeler, have been a couple since 2016, and for most of that time they managed the rare trick of being famous together without making it a product. The British Vogue video below, in which they play “Never Have I Ever”, is about as much as they ever offered on the record.

This summer, reports that they had quietly split spread from a gossip blog to entertainment sites, built on unnamed sources. Neither Heaton nor Dyer has said a word about it. Until one of them does, I file it where it belongs: under rumor. Heaton also has a son, born in 2014, with the Japanese musician Akiko Matsuura, his former bandmate. He has kept the boy out of public life, and so will we.

2026: Industry, Below and a Shelby

The post-Hawkins schedule is the busiest of his career. In January he joined the fourth season of HBO’s Industry as Jim Dycker, a financial journalist, using his own British accent for once. In Below, created by Jesse McKeown, he plays Wade Penney, the son of Hartnett’s Newfoundland fisherman, in a town with a creature in the water. He called Newfoundland “one of the most magical places I’ve been to”, which is generous for a place where his character spends most of the time very cold and very frightened.

The bigger news is Birmingham. In May, Netflix and the BBC released the first look at Heaton as Charles Shelby, Tommy Shelby’s grown son, in the new Peaky Blinders series set in the early 1950s, a decade after the film The Immortal Man. The official synopsis says Charles “is now embracing normality”. No release date yet. Casting a boy from Bridlington as the heir to the most famous family in Birmingham crime is a choice I respect: Yorkshire has been waiting for this.

My take

Child stars get one story and teenage stars get two; Heaton arrived at 22 and seems to be writing a third. He spent a decade as the quiet brother in the background of someone else’s monster story. Now he is in a monster story of his own, with a flat cap waiting in Birmingham. The camera is in someone else’s hands these days, and he looks perfectly fine with that.

Sources

• Charlie Heaton on Instagram, October 2026
• Charlie Heaton on Instagram (@charlie.r.heaton)
• Netflix Tudum: Below, cast, release date and plot
• Extra: Charlie Heaton on how Stranger Things prepared him for Below (October 8, 2026)
• Netflix Tudum: Stranger Things season 5 release dates
• British Vogue: Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton play “Never Have I Ever” (YouTube)
• TheWrap: Industry season 4 adds Kal Penn, Claire Forlani and Charlie Heaton
• Variety: Charlie Heaton as Charles Shelby in the Peaky Blinders series
• Billy Knight (film), Wikipedia
• Charlie Heaton, Wikipedia
• Enola Holmes (film), Wikipedia