Stranger Things Star, Noah Schnapp, Comes Out
On TikTok, the 18-year-old actor posted a video of himself with the caption, “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 also added a popular TikTok audio from princessazula0, and lip-synched to her saying, “You know what it never was? That serious. It was never that serious. Quite frankly, it will never be that serious.”
Schnapp plays high school junior, Will Byers in the hit Netflix sci-fi series. In July, Schnapp confirmed to Variety that his Stranger Things character is gay. “I guess I’m more similar to Will than I thought,” he wrote on his January 5 TikTok post.
“Obviously, it was hinted at in season one,” Schnapp told Variety. “It was always kind of there, but you never really knew, is it just him growing up slower than his friends? Now that he’s gotten older, they made it a very real, obvious thing.”
Will is secretly in love with his friend, Mike Wheeler, played by Finn Wolfhard. How that relationship plays out will be seen in the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, which begins production later this year.
Schnapp’s coming-out message on TikTok, to his 31 million followers, has been overwhelmingly positively received, including from Netflix itself which gave it three hearts.
Schnapp’s character has been a central part of the Stranger Things narrative. His disappearance into “the Underneath” where he was held captive by an evil entity, kicked off season one and prompted the other characters to band together to rescue him.
Stranger Things season 4 is notable for sending the song Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush to the top of global music charts, 37 years after its initial release in 1985.
