Connor Jessup 6Xs for X-Mas
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We’ve been crushing on out actor Connor Jessup since he played Ben Mason on Falling Skies. To celebrate his Netflix hit show Locke & Key surpassing one billion minutes of streaming time, we offer up the 27 year-old Jessup looking sexy six times on the night before the night before Christmas.
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Appearing in the latest issue of V Man he says that after a tumultuous second season for his character Tyler, “It’s funny, when you’re working on something for so long, there are all these questions you ask yourself. And then as you go over the course of a year or two years, those questions just sort of become a little more unconscious, and you start thinking about it a little less. You think about the details of what you’re doing every day, but the overarching questions become less present.”
Like with Tyler, Jessup believes that over time, the picture of a person materializes, to the point that you develop a general idea of who they are. You’re then just left with a few blanks to fill, personality traits to sprinkle in.
A major one he filled was when he publicly came out as gay in 2019, and since then, he’s been on a journey to embrace more queer stories while also embracing those parts of himself. A big milestone in that route came with his turn as a guest judge on the latest season of Canada’s Drag Race, what he terms his “pass to gay heaven.” “I was so nervous. Beautifully nervous, but truly nervous,” he explains. “But everyone was so welcoming. And that’s the reason why we all love Drag Race, is that great sense of openness and acceptance, warmth, joy that permeates that show.”
Being on the show, while also being liberating, made him think more about the choices he was making, from the life-changing ones to something as simple as wearing make-up for his judging duties. “It was only recently that I started asking myself why I was not open to these things or why I was not having more fun with them,” he says. “I spent so much of my life living in this way without even really noticing it, inside this image of who I thought I was, who I should be as a respectable serious-minded man, how I thought he would behave or dress or the choices he would make. And it’s only in the last year or two that I’ve started to ask myself what choices I’m making.”
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The thing that I’m so fucking thankful for about being gay, other than just how fun it is, is that it has sped up enormously this process in me. I think that it opened the door to a lot of other questions, and a willingness to question. And that I think is what queerness is, essentially. I understand that I’m speaking from a very specific place of privilege.
But all that being said, I am grateful to be part of that community, even if I am on a very privileged side of it.” He’s spent the last few months engaging with a variety of sources of literature that have brought him comfort and perspective, particularly queer pieces like the comic series Heartstopper or the Brian Washington book Memorial. Speaking of the book, he says, “Even though it is very American, it actually exists very much like a Japanese tradition. It’s an embracing of the mundane, that I found really moving, especially in a queer context,” he adds. “You see queer stories, even the most beautiful ones, being dramatic and doomed. And this was a very straight, steady, quiet story and it made me feel like the window had gotten a little bit more open.”
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