Guadalajara Mexico.- Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp has come out as gay.
The actor who plays the character Will Byers on Netflix’s hit sci-fi series opened up to his fans Thursday in a video on TikTok.
“When I finally told my friends and family that I was gay after being scared in the closet for 18 years, all they said was ‘we know,'” the 18-year-old actor recounted in the clip.
“I guess I look more like Will than I thought,” he wrote at the bottom of the video, referring to his character Will Byers on the hit Netflix series.
Over the four seasons of Stranger Things, fans have repeatedly questioned whether Will was gay, with some even criticizing the series for not explicitly stating the seemingly obvious.
In July, Schnapp addressed Will’s sexual orientation, confirming that the teen has romantic feelings for his best friend Mike (Finn Wolfhard).
The actor told Variety that the writers began hinting at Will’s sexuality in the first season.
“Now that he’s aged, they made it very real and obvious. Now it’s 100 percent clear that he’s gay and that he loves Mike. But before, it was a slow arc. I think it’s very well done, because it’s very easy to do for a character to suddenly be gay,” Schnapp said.
Schnapp added that Will’s character’s sexuality took time to unpack because in real life it’s a tricky space, specifically for kids who don’t want to be labelled.
In the penultimate episode of season four, volume two, Will takes an emotional moment to profess his love to Mike, but pretends he’s speaking from Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) point of view, not his own.
Stranger Things will conclude with the fifth season, but there is still no confirmation of when its production will begin, nor when it will be released.
