Noah Schnapp, the young actor who plays the closeted gay teenager Will Byers on Netflix’s Stranger Things, has come out in real life as gay. Posting to TikTok on Thursday, the 18-year-old Schnapp wrote that friends and family were supportive.
“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’,” Schnapp said.
The star added a lip-synch video over the quote “you know what it never was? That serious. It was never that serious. Quite frankly, will never be that serious” with the text “I guess I’m more similar to Will than I thought.”
It was heavily hinted at Will’s budding sexuality at the end of the last season of Stranger Things where he couldn’t tell Mike (Finn Wolfhard) about his feelings and suffered in silence in the car. It was a scene that caught a lot of attention and resonated with fans.
Schapp praised the way the show presented the reveal of his character’s revelation.
“I think it is done so beautifully because it’s so easy to make a character just like all of a sudden be gay,” he said. “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.”
Season 5 of Stranger Things will be it’s last, but the creators haven’t ruled out spin-offs down the line.
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