Noah Scnapp Credits “Stranger Things” For Helping Him Come Out
Stranger Things actor Noah Schnapp revealed to Variety that portraying Will Byers helped him accept that he’s gay. The show’s fourth season paralleled his own personal experience as Will grappled with his sexuality in silence while his friends appeared to navigate romance with ease.
“You know what it never was? That serious.”
Schnapp speaks about realising his own sexuality in childhood but fearing he wasn’t ready to come out to the world yet. He had come out to close friends and family, but he felt tentative about letting himself be out publicly.
Season four of Stranger Things placed Will Byers’ sexuality at the forefront of his character development. For the first time, fans were given on-screen confirmation that Will is gay and Noah decided to gage the reaction to Will’s coming out as a metric for how it would be for him personally.
“Once I did fully embrace that Will was gay, it was just an exponential speed towards accepting it for myself,” he says. “I would be in a completely different place if I didn’t have Will to portray, and to embrace and help me accept myself. I think if I never played that character, I probably would still be closeted.”
In a very Gen Z move, Noah posted his coming out on TikTok to a simple audio that says, “You know what it never was? That serious.” The video caption reads: “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'”.
He tells Variety about posting the video on a car ride back from dropping his twin sister to college. “When I opened my phone at the end of the car ride, it was, like, a thousand texts of hearts and congratulations and rainbow flags,” he recounts. “I was crying. I was like, ‘I made it. I’m done. I don’t have to worry.’”
Playing Will allowed Noah to embrace his queerness with a safety net. He was only 11-years-old when Stranger Things began filming; the short jump to the present shows how much progress the young star has made and how much the series helped him on his journey.
