Netflix’s Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp, who plays Will Byers, has come out as gay.
In a TikTok video posted on Thursday, Schnapp wrote, “When I finally told my friends and family I was gay after being scared in the closet for 18 years and all they said was ‘we know’” — over Schnapp lip-syncing to an audio clip from a different TikTok of someone saying, “You know what it never was? That serious. It was never that serious. Quite frankly, will never be that serious.”
He captioned the TikTok video, “I guess I’m more similar to Will than I thought.”
For the first time, Schnapp confirmed in July that Will Byers is gay and in love with his best friend Mike (Finn Wolfhard) after the premiere of the final two episodes of “Stranger Things.”
“It was always kind of there, but you never really knew, is it just him growing up slower than his friends?” Schnapp said. “Now that he’s gotten older, they made it a very real, obvious thing. Now it’s 100% clear that he is gay and he does love Mike.”
“Stranger Things” fans have been asking about Will’s $exuality since the first episode, but Schnapp has always deflected questions about it, saying the character is still “up to the audience.”
“I think it is done so beautifully, because it’s so easy to make a character just like all of a sudden be gay,” Schnapp said. “People have come up to me — I was just in Paris and this, like, 40-year-old man came up to me and he was like, ‘Wow, this Will character made me feel so good. And I related to it so much. That is exactly who I was when I was a kid.’ That just made me so happy to hear. They are writing this real character and this real journey and real struggle and they’re doing it so well.”
“I think it’s all just part of the challenge of acting,” he said. “This isn’t just a single layer thing of he’s struggling with coming out. It’s this multifaceted trauma that goes years back, because he was taken by the Demogorgon and then his friends, they never acknowledged him, and now he’s scared to come out and doesn’t know if they’ll accept him.”
Despite Netflix and the Duffers announcing Season 5 of “Stranger Things” will end the series, there’s no confirmation as of yet about when production will begin, let alone when it’ll premiere.
