Noah Schnapp was stuck in his drafts. The 18-year-old actor, who’d become a household name on Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” kept putting off posting a video he’d shot on his phone — an announcement …
,” kept putting off posting a video he’d shot on his phone — an announcement he’d been contemplating making for a few months. His closest friends kept texting him:No, I’m not ready. I’m not ready. I’m not ready.
that his “Stranger Things” character Will Byers is gay. Since the show premiered in 2016, when Schnapp was 11, he had been fielding — and deflecting — questions about Will’s sexuality in the press and on social media. By the summer of 2022, however, “Stranger Things” had become one of Netflix’s biggest shows ever with Season 4, and its story had placed Will’s sexuality undeniably front and center.
They’d also conceived Will from the start as a kid struggling with his sexual identity, based in part on a friend they’d had in middle school who was going through the same issues. In the series premiere, Will’s mother, Joyce , says that other kids call Will “queer,” and that his absent father had called him an anti-gay slur.
By Season 3 of “Stranger Things,” however, Schnapp couldn’t keep denying to himself that Will is gay, especially after his best friend Mike says to him, “It’s not my fault that you don’t like girls.” But even as Will’s entire storyline in Season 4 revolved around his unrequited love for Mike — and he was actively playing him as a closeted gay teenager — Schnapp says he just refused to allow himself to connect to what Will was going through.
Then Schnapp went back to college — and, like a lot of LGBTQ kids still sorting themselves out, he slid back into the closet. “Being fully aware of it and just completely, blatantly hiding it, it was really hard,” Schnapp says. “It just made everything miserable for those months.” Schnapp’s mother became so worried about him that she visited him to see if he was OK.
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