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‘Stranger Things’ actor Noah Schnapp says directors were ‘not loving’ the cast going through puberty
It's been six years since the first season dropped on Netflix, and the cast has grown up quite a lot since then.
The Stranger Things gang has been through a lot since the first season dropped on Netflix back in 2016, and the kids we met back then have grown into young adults in the years since.
Apparently though, the kids were growing up a little too fast for the slower-moving timeline of the Stranger Things world. In a recent interview with Flaunt, Noah Schnapp — who plays Will Byers on the series — shared how the adults in charge reacted to him going through puberty.
“It was the peak time of change, and puberty and growing up and just everything was changing with all of us, and the directors were just not loving it,” Schnapp told Flaunt about filming in the earlier seasons. “And I remember one of the producers coming up to me and telling me, ‘Noah, is there any way you could just speak in a higher tone and just slouch a little bit? Like, we need you to keep that Season 1 innocence that you had.’ That was like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you. My voice is dropping. I don’t sound young anymore.’”
Nothing can stop the passage of time, however, and Schnapp also shared that he likes that the show marks his growing up. “It’s just crazy,” he said, “because I get to watch not only this character, but myself grow up onscreen. Now I’ll be able to always have this archive of me as a 10-year-old actor, and me now, and I’ll be able to show that to my kids, and it’s just crazy that that’ll live there forever.”
Schnapp and the rest of the cast will be returning to the world of Stranger Things for a fifth and final season, and Schnapp isn’t the only actor that has aged past the age of their characters. The gap has become big enough that show creators, the Duffer Brothers, have said that they’re likely to have a time jump between Seasons 4 and 5 to account for it.
Alas, we'll have to wait a bit to find out for sure about that time jump in Stranger Things 5, as Netflix has yet to announce a premiere for the upcoming season.
In the meantime, you can check out sci-fi shows like Resident Alien, Brave New World, Project Blue Book, Eureka, Heroes, Intergalactic, and more streaming now on Peacock.
