Warning: Spoilers ahead for XO, Kitty season 3.
XO, Kitty had never been on Sule Thelwell’s radar. But just over a year ago, Thelwell agreed to help his friend, Ola Teniola, record a self-tape for Marius—a mysterious new character who locks horns with protagonist Kitty Song Covey (Anna Cathcart)—in Jenny Han’s Netflix coming-of-age rom-com series. A couple of days later, Thelwell found the same audition sitting in his inbox.
“The first time I did it was from Kitty’s perspective to my friend being Marius, and I watched him do it. I understood how Kitty felt about him,” Thelwell explains to Teen Vogue. “When I went to do mine maybe a day later, I said to him, ‘Hey, bro. If you get this role, it’s because you’re a great actor. If I get this role, it’s because I saw you do it first.’”
The role ultimately went to Thelwell, a Jamaican actor who made his professional acting debut in 2023 in Hulu’s Saint X. Thankfully, by the time he uprooted his life to work in Seoul, South Korea, for a few months, he had a much better idea of what he had signed up for.
“When I heard that I got the job, which was after three different rounds of auditioning, I had either just finished all the episodes or had one more episode to watch,” recalls Thelwell, who landed the role on his little sister’s birthday (April 10). “I would reward myself by watching more the further I got in [the process]. I was like, ‘I don’t want to like it too much and then be heartbroken, so I’m keeping a bit of distance. Give me some distance.’ But I’m a fan now, 100%.
“It was so surreal to have watched everyone from my home, and then seeing everyone in real life, and then being like, ‘Oh, you’re either exactly like I thought you’d be, or nothing like I thought you’d be.’ That was such a wonderful and almost out-of-body experience,” he adds. “Because I met them as their characters first, it was really interesting to re-meet them as people.”
In the eight-episode third season, which dropped on Thursday, Marius returns to the Korean Independent School of Seoul (KISS) for his senior year to reconnect with Quincy “Q” Shabazian (Anthony Keyvan), the former roommate he used to hook up with in secret during their sophomore year. Though he has since come to terms with his sexuality, Marius is dismayed to learn that Q, who sent him a suggestive photo over the summer, is happily dating his fellow former track star rival, Jin (Joshua Lee). To add insult to injury, Marius is not exactly pleased that Kitty can’t help but meddle in his friendships with her boyfriend Minho (Sang Heon Lee) and her ex Dae (Choi Min-yeong).
Below, Thelwell digs into the psychology of his potentially polarizing character and explains how he went from being an aspiring architect to pursuing a career as a thespian with no set blueprint.
Sule Thelwell: For him, leaving and also returning to KISS came at the expense of different elements of his life. The person he was with, the girl he was with before [when he was secretly hooking up with Q], I imagine that [relationship] did not end on a great note. I imagine that they probably are on talking terms now, but I think him understanding and coming to terms with what he wants was a real rebirthing process for him. I think he had no intention of coming back to KISS at first. He ran away with his tail between his legs. He realized that some things are special—and he felt something undeniably special and just wants to continue to feel special. He doesn’t want to give up on that.
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ST: I think [he’s] just justifying how special the relationship would have been. It’s super easy for somebody that you live with to potentially annoy you, because you spend so much time with a person. Because you learn so much about them so quickly, it’s really easy to come across things that you’re like, “Oh, actually, we have friction in this way. We don’t vibe in this way.” When [that proximity] causes a bond to happen, when you feel comfortable and actively want or yearn for that relationship to continue to deepen, I feel like it’s a really beautiful thing.
I think he went away, and he hasn’t felt anything that special since. I feel like at first he was just like, “Yeah. You’re in a relationship. I was in a relationship before. You’ll come to realize what I’ve spent all this time discovering, [which] is that we are it [for each other]. I’ll just wait for you to see that because I have no question about the fact that we are it.” I think he’s just hell-bent, very sweetly so, on the idea of, “We are it.” Then he realizes that life doesn’t always play out in your favor, on your time.
He also recognizes that if you do really appreciate someone and if you are actually listening, [you have to respect when] this person says that they’re happy. “At the root of what I want is just to make this person happy. If that’s not necessarily with me, I’m not going to think about what that’s going to mean right now, because that’s going to [stir up] a lot of feelings, but I can sit nice in knowing that he’s happy. He’s not with me, but it doesn’t matter. He’s happy.” You just repeat that mantra to yourself until you get over it, because also… They’re 17 years old! They will get over it. [Laughs.]
ST: They were each other’s firsts for a lot of things. I think there’s a certain soft spot, a certain purity, to being someone’s first, especially being each other’s first. I feel like it’s one of those loves that traversed space and time, and existed even when they were so far apart. Marius definitely thought about him. Marius thought about him enough to want to come back, so I think they should give [their relationship] a real good go. I think they should go, “Because of what this was [in secret], I think we should at least give it a try to see if it burns the same way [in public],” because that fire was bright.
ST: [Grins] You never know!
ST: It’s a privilege. It’s an honor. I feel like people will be able to connect with his humanity and what he wants. Watching this young man figure out and fight for what he believes in, even if he’s misguided a little bit at first, especially if the feelings are real, I feel like people will connect with [this idea of], “Oh, I’ve loved, and I’ve lost”—hopefully not the love of your life, but a good one who’s gotten away. I hope that people can see themselves in that. I feel like it’s wonderful and beautiful when people are able to see themselves in [characters]. I just want to make people smile. I just want people to feel something. People will feel, hopefully, a roller-coaster of things when it comes to Marius and his motivations. [Laughs.]
ST: Whilst I was at drama school in the U.K., my auntie sent me a picture, and I was four or five years old. I had this little sign that I wrote, and it was like, “Movie of Superman, directed by Sule Thelwell, starring Sule.” I’ve been on this journey my whole life. I just teetered in different directions a bit, but I’m back on my journey. Ever since I was a little pumpkin, whenever I heard accents on TV or whenever I heard the commentators for racehorse races, I’d always mimic them. My family was like, “Oh, you’re really good at that accent.” Every Christmas, every birthday, every event, [they’d say] “Sule, come here. Do the British voice.” Then I’d have to do it for my whole family, so I’ve always been performing and entertaining. I just didn’t think it was a viable option job-wise for me.
I always wanted to be an artist because I write. I write music. I write short stories. I also can paint well. I’m a trained draftsman, so I could architecturally draw as well as sketch real-life style drawings and paintings. I always was like, “I don’t want to abandon my art. I would like to do something that allows me to keep hold of the things that I like to do.” Growing up in Jamaica, especially on stage, you don’t see a whole lot of Jamaican actors doing things on the international stage in this way. I never had somebody to aim to be like.
ST: I went to America to audition for school in London, because I couldn’t fly all the way to London just to audition. That was also a really interesting task, to convince my mother to buy me a plane ticket so that I could audition. But when I auditioned, I told them, “Hey, guys. I don’t have 12 million Jamaican dollars just ready to go, so I would need a scholarship.” They got back to me earlier than they normally would. They said, “Hey, we really want you. We’re going to tell admissions to take you.” I was like, “Oh, wow.” [But] I got the email and they’re like, “Yeah… provided that you’re able to pay for it all.”
I was between a rock and a hard place, because we don’t have that cash. COVID ended up happening. I was going to sell some artwork. I was going to do as much as I could to try [to pay for it], and I ended up going with a GoFundMe because I was like, “I don’t have any other plausible options. If I don’t ask for help, I probably will have to give up on this dream.”
There was a Jamaican lady who is the head of acting for another school in London that reached out to me and said, “Hey, I saw your GoFundMe. I did research on you, and I found your acting. I like your acting, and I want to offer you a full-tuition scholarship to my school.” I was like, “Oh my gosh. Wow, thank you.” Then she said, “But I do know that you really would like to go to the school that you want to go to, and I know because I also went there. I’d like you to reach out to them. I’d like you to say to them that I said I would be giving you a full-tuition scholarship to come to my school. Just see what they say.” The next day I had a full-tuition scholarship from the school I wanted to go to!
ST: It’s super specific. I think [A24 is] making a film about the Backrooms right now, but the Backrooms are an urban legend, phenomenon kind of thing. It’s scary. It’s horror almost, but it’s about the anticipation and fear of what is around the corner. It’s not about a monster. It’s not about a [specific] thing. [I would want] to work on something like that with Jordan Peele, for example. I would like to do things of that nature, because I find horror movies quite funny. I don’t know why. [Laughs.] I’d really want to be on the inside of the making of one of those films.
For a long time, I’ve wanted to play Miles Morales, but I feel like so many Black male actors want to play Miles Morales. He is the apex of what is possible—of what is the biggest dream at the moment—because he is this gigantic Black hero, this force to be reckoned with. I’m excited for not only [those existing Black] heroes, but the heroes that will come out of whatever needs we have as a society and as a people now that have probably yet to be written, that are probably yet to be seen on screen. I hope we have a wave of heroes—they could be real people; they could be supernatural or fantastical. I’d love to have some tall, elvish ears, jumping from roof to roof. Jamaicans run. We have the fastest people ever. I’m super athletic. Just get me in something physical!
