ROUGHLY six months after confirming to Variety that his Stranger Things character's oft-speculated sexuality, actor Noah Schnapp has also come out as gay.
The 18-year-old actor who played Will Byers in Stranger Things became a sensation as the show gained popularity, alongside his co-stars Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin.
In a video posted to his TikTok account, he humorously revealed with a caption “I guess I’m more similar to Will than I thought.”
In the short clip, he 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'” while 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.”
@noahschnapp I guess I’m more similar to will than I thought
♬ original sound - princessazula0
During the fourth season of Stranger Things, the actor revealed that his character Will Byers is in love with his best friend Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard).
“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.”
“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.”
In the Variety story, when asked how he navigated the attention on Will’s sexuality while he was also still figuring himself out, the actor pointed to all the tribulations the character has faced over the course of the series.
“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.”
Netflix and the Duffers have announced that Season 5 of ‘Stranger Things’ will conclude the show, but has yet to move forward with production or announce a release date. – The Vibes, January 6, 2023
