‘Locke & Key’s Connor Jessup Reveals His “Delicate” Take On Tyler Locke

In the comic Locke & Key, written by Joe Hill with art by Gabriel Rodriguez, Tyler Locke is a big oaf. The oldest of three kids, Rodriguez draws him as big and broad as any football player, his face hanging low, constantly shaded by the Oakland A’s baseball hat gifted to him by his murdered father, Rendell. He’s fiercely devoted to his family, but like most kids on the cusp of adulthood, wavering between wanting to grow up, and needing to remain a kid for a little bit longer.

That’s not Connor Jessup, who plays Tyler on Netflix’s adaptation of the book.

“Physically, I’m different,” Jessup told Decider about the role. “He is much thicker, and both physically and emotionally… He is maybe in a deeper register. And that just doesn’t come super naturally to me.”

Jessup, up until now, was probably best known for starring as Ben Mason on TNT’s Falling Skies, and multiple roles on ABC’s anthology American Crime. However, starring as Tyler on Locke & Key will probably be his biggest role to date.

Though some comics to screen adaptations go completely faithful to the material, and some jettison the source material entirely, Netflix’s Locke & Key takes a little bit more of the Marvel Cinematic Universe route. Meaning, producers Carlton Cuse and Meredith Averill, working with Hill, looked at the essence of the characters on the page and then used that to inform the casting; while not being beholden to it. That’s true of Darby Stanchfield, who you wouldn’t immediately think of for Locke family matriarch Nina Locke, and it’s true of Jessup, as well.

“[Connor’s] is actually an interesting study in how casting can slightly inform some alterations to a character,” Averill told us, “because Tyler in the comic and the Tyler in our series have some slight differences. But some notable differences. I mean, in the comic he’s a bit of a goon. He’s extremely tall, he’s very muscular, he’s like a fist. And Connor is not that.”

As soon as Jessup was cast as Tyler, he read the six volumes of the comic series over the course of a weekend, and was, “moved by how beautiful they were, how beautifully rendered the depiction of grief and trauma, what it means to grow up, those things.” In the books, after Rendell Locke is murdered, the family moves to a small town in Massachusetts. There, Tyler, along with his siblings Kinsey (Emilia Jones) and Bode (Jackson Robert Scott) discover a series of magical keys, and an evil entity living in the well house nearby who wants them. What follows is an epic battle that ultimately helps the family move forward from immense tragedy.

And once Jessup had the sense of the books… He put them aside, and didn’t look at them again for the duration of filming.

“I felt like I had gotten the spirit of it and I had gotten the feelings,” Jessup recalled, “And I felt like, after that, my obligation is to the scripts that I’m given and to Carlton and Meredith and to this version of the character.”

In fact, his take was so different than the Tyler in the books, Jessup didn’t even realize where he was pushing the character until he worked with a director who pointed out the differences. Having not yet seen the first few episodes, but being familiar with the books, the director called out that Jessup’s Tyler was much more “delicate than in the comics.” At that moment, Jessup’s “heart stopped,” but the more he thought about it, the more he realized that was the core of his take on Tyler Locke, and leaned into this “delicacy.”

“[Connor’s] brought so much vulnerability and sensitivity to Tyler that wasn’t always necessarily on the page,” Averill added, “but that we decided to write towards in the show. And we think he’s just phenomenal at Tyler.”

You’ll get to see Jessup’s take on Tyler Locke for yourself when Locke & Key debuts on Netflix on February 7.

Stream Locke & Key on Netflix