Did Al Pacino make Charlie Heaton a better actor?
I wonder how the cultural moment of the final season of Stranger Things will be perceived in pop culture history. The TV show that reshaped the television landscape and launched many actors to international fame, among them Charlie Heaton, invites a lot of introspection.
While fatigue with the show has been growing, Stranger Things season five still crashed Netflix, and there is no denying the impact it has had, or the status of its lead cast. Millie Bobby Brown is arguably the biggest name to come out of it all, but we also have Heaton, who has been portraying Jonathan Byers with care for years now. While Stranger Things was having its decade-long run, Heaton also starred in The New Mutants, No Future, Billy Knight, and more.
“Charlie has this global appeal now and is an incredible actor,” says Billy Knight director Alec Griffin Roth in a new interview with Variety. “There’s something about him that’s very modern and very unique.”
The story of Billy Knight follows two aspiring filmmakers who discover a handkerchief inscribed with the name “Billy Knight” amid a box of old scripts inherited from Alex’s (Heaton) father. The twist: They track down Billy himself, an old film director played by Al Pacino.
Working with him is a massive opportunity for any young actor. “He’s very intellectual,” Roth continues to say about Heaton. “Charlie is someone who wants to learn about the character and be a better actor. But he learned that from Al Pacino, not from me.”
Talking about Pacino’s disillusioned character in Billy Knight, who fears for the future of cinema, Roth goes on to say, “Even if the quote is that nobody cares about films anymore, it doesn’t have to be true. Young people still love movies.”
Of course, Heaton had already been holding his own amid the roster of rising stars and veterans in Stranger Things for years by the time Billy Knight came out in 2025. Billy Knight screened at the Torino Film Festival and is ultimately not at all a consideration heading into awards season, with Netflix’s Jay Kelly apparently taking the lead as the movie about making movies, following a washed-up actor inspired by George Clooney (who plays him).
As for Heaton, internalising a desire to keep learning and improving will be a boon to his future career. His “intellectual” capacity to delve into a new character is what every good, let alone great, actor needs to do the basics of to portray them authentically. But Roth gives the impression that this is a lesson Heaton truly took to heart after working with Pacino, the legendary star of The Godfather and its two sequels.
Where will Heaton take these skills next? He is set to star in the romantic comedy Twice Over from director Alena Lodkina (Strange Colours, Petrol), opposite Mia Wasikowska. Maybe this movie will be absolutely nothing, but maybe not. He also stars in the ongoing HBO Max series Industry, about a group of bankers following the 2008 collapse (season four premieres in January 2026). He, Josh Hartnett, and Mackenzie Davis also have a new horror Netflix series coming up.
Post-Billy Knight and the paradigm-altering phenomenon of Stranger Things, we could see some truly remarkable things from Charlie Heaton.
