INTERVIEW
.jpg)
Vee Pandey | 16/10/2026
Leila Khan is having the kind of year most actors spend their twenties chasing. Fresh from Heartstopper, the Netflix phenomenon that turned its young cast into a global beacon for a generation, Leila has stepped into Adultery, a darker, messier role as Jess, a teenager carrying far more than her years. Between filming stints in Belfast, she spoke to us about first loves, fictional heartbreak, and why she’s manifesting The Hunger Games so loudly the universe has probably filed a noise complaint.
“I was plucked from my dream world.” Khan still talks about Heartstopper with the wide-eyed disbelief of someone who hasn’t quite accepted her own life. She joined in season two, walking onto a set where the core cast had already spent a year becoming a family and, admitting she was understandably nervous, worried she wouldn’t fit.
“One of my biggest worries when I booked the job wasn’t even about the acting or the pressure of the fanbase,” she says. “It was like, these guys have known each other for a year. What if I don’t gel?”
By day one, that fear had evaporated. “They just welcomed me with open arms, but not in a ‘let’s be nice to the new girl’ way. They were all having their inside jokes, and I was joining in on them by the end of day one.” Now, she says, they’re “some of my closest friends in the world.”
That chemistry isn’t just PR-speak; it’s the engine of the show. Twelve-hour days, four-month shoots, the same faces again, “They really do become your closest people in the world,” Khan explains. “And then you fly home, and you don’t see them again every day, and it is really weird to adjust.” She calls it “post-job blues,” and honestly, same.
The Heartstopper fandom is famously enormous and, unusually for fandom culture, famously kind. Khan got her first real sense of its scale during a shoot in Paris, early in her tenure. “That was the pin dropping of like, oh, this show is huge and it’s affected so many people’s lives,” she recalls. Having grown up working-class in a small town, fandom culture felt foreign to her. “I’d never expected people to be such massive fans of something like that.”
Her experience, though, has been overwhelmingly positive. “They genuinely just want to share their love for the show and how it’s changed their life,” she says. “I’ve luckily never had anything too negative… I just have only ever experienced love from the fans.”
It’s a refreshing anomaly in an internet that treats young actors like content. And Khan doesn’t take it for granted: “I always felt quite a lot of gratitude to be able to be part of something that has moved the world in such a brilliant way.”
Her new role in Adultery couldn’t be further from the warmth of Heartstopper. Jess is angry, acting out, complicated and Khan was determined not to flatten her into the tired “hormonal teenage girl” archetype.
Wearing Hexter & Baines Cronvas
Dress, LANES @studio_lanes_london. Shoes, FARRAGO @iamafarrago. Jewellery, CLAY @clay.jewellery.
Dress, SAMANTA VIRGINIO @samantavirginio. Tights, CALZEDONIA @calzedonia. Shoes, FARRAGO @iamafarrago.
“I saw the sides on paper. It was this rebellious girl acting out, but I’ve been that kind of girl,” she says. “I didn’t want Jess to just be that stereotypical girl who’s got hormones… I wanted her to feel 3D.”
For Khan, the key was remembering that teenage feelings aren’t small just because they are young. “There are things happening at that time in our life that are so pivotal to our character and who we become,” she says. “I just wanted to be the person to be like, I see you.”
She built Jess a whole off-screen history: a sick mother, a father who needed help, younger siblings, and a girl forced to grow up before she was ready. “When she meets Ollie, she kind of reverts into that childhood,” Khan explains. “She’s having fun and being youthful with Ollie. But then her mum’s back, and her mum’s telling her what to do… there’s that conflict: how can your boss me around when I’ve been the boss?” It’s a dynamic that will ring painfully true for anyone who’s ever had to be the responsible one too young. “There are so many young people out there who must step up and be a carer,” Khan notes. “I think you see it all the time, and it’s more common than people realise.”
Much of Adultery hinges on Jess’s relationship with Ollie, played by Johnny—her first boyfriend and, in Khan’s reading, “the most important relationship she had in the world at that time.”
“Everyone experiences their first love, and it’s so… suffocating, or it just becomes everything that you are at that time,” she says. “That’s all you can think about.”
She and Johnny leaned on a fast-formed friendship to build the chemistry, but the emotional truth came from remembering what first love feels like. There’s also something disarmingly simple about how young people handle conflict, she points out:” “When Jess has a problem with Ollie, she just says it to him… It’s so funny and ironic that the children handle the issues so much easier than adults do.”
.jpg)
.jpg)
-Edit.jpg)
Playing someone as wounded as Jess left marks. “There were moments towards the end of the series with some really heavy moments for Jess,” Khan says. “I remember going home in the car… just not being able to shake that off for a little bit.” She describes the strange intimacy of character work: “To me, she genuinely is a real person… it feels like a friend of yours, and I’ve really found it difficult. Some nights I would go home, and I would feel so much pain for her and what she was going through. And then you just kind of have to remind yourself it’s not real.”
Boundaries, she admits, are still a work in progress. “I’ve only just learned how to navigate myself on a set now… the more I play heavier, complex characters, the more I’ll get a grip on creating those boundaries with myself and the character.”
Her coping mechanism, borrowed from a Keke Palmer soundbite, is simple: “I am the queen of a reframe.” Every setback gets flipped. “One door closes, another opens, and I genuinely do believe in that.”
And what does the queen of the reframe want next? The Hunger Games, obviously — and she’s not subtle about it. “I’m manifesting it so hard,” she laughs. For Khan, the franchise has everything: “action and intensity and the massive scale of the beautiful sets,” plus the kind of “thought-provoking message” she’s drawn to. Beyond Panem, she wants complicated family dynamics — father-and-son, mother-and-daughter, the kind of relationships “you can really sink your teeth into.”
Given that she’s already proven she can make a fictional teenager feel like your best mate, your little sister, and your own past self all at once, we’d bet the universe is listening. Give her the role already.
Creative Alice S Gee @alicesgee
Photography Anya Levi @anyalevistudio
Styling Emma Wells @emmawells__
Hair Styling Sven Bayerback @svenbayerbach Carol Hayes Management
@carolhayesmanagement
MUA Annie Brønning @annibronningbeauty
Styling Assistant Katy Lavender @k.lavender.grace
Words Vee Pandey
Shirt, A-Jane @ajaneofficial. Skirt, LISA @lisa_thelabel. Jacket, ACIDSIIA @acidsiia. Shoes, ROKER @rokeratelier. Belts, NROHMOT @nroh.mot. Earrings, CLAY @clay.jewellery. Ring, MAISON LUMIERE CN @maisonlumiere.cn
Wearing Hexter & Baines Cronvas
Dress, SAMANTA VIRINIO @samantavirginio. Jacket, REBECCA LI @rebeccaqli. Jewellery, CLAY @clay.jewellery. Shoes, PLEIADES @pleiades_shoes.
Dress, JULIE PEREIRA MARTINS @jucie_martins. Jewellery, MAISON LUMIERE CN @maisonlumiere.cn.
.jpg)
