Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp has come out as gay.
The 18-year-old posted a video on TikTok Thursday featuring an onscreen caption that read, “When I finally told my friends and family I was gay after being scared and in the closet for 18 years and all they said was ‘we know.’”
The clip shows Schnapp lip-synching to a popular audio clip of someone saying, “You know what it never was? That serious. It was never that serious. Quite frankly, will never be that serious.”
In the video’s caption, Schnapp wrote, “I guess I’m more similar to Will than I thought.”
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@noahschnapp I guess I’m more similar to will than I thought
In the blockbuster Netflix series, Schnapp plays Will Byers, one of the show’s core group of small-town monster-hunting teens. During Stranger Things’ recent fourth season, there was widespread fan speculation about whether the character was gay. Schnapp had previously said in interviews that his character’s sexuality could be left up to audience interpretation.
But Season 4 featured a painful scene in which Will essentially admitted that he had romantic feelings for his best friend Mike (Finn Wolfhard). Though the character stopped short of actually saying he was queer, fans got the message, with some even taking issue with the fact that Will didn’t explicitly come out.
But as LGBTQ Nation’s Nic Austin wrote in July, the scene was a more accurate reflection of the struggle to come out in the 1980s, when the series is set.
“Coming out in the 1980s was not something that happened often or lightly, especially in rural Indiana, where the series takes place,” Austin wrote. “It’s idealistic to expect Will to come out to his friends based on our modern perceptions of what coming out is supposed to look like.”
Schnapp later confirmed that Will is indeed gay. “Now it’s 100% clear that he is gay and he does love Mike,” he told Variety in July. “It was a slow arc. I think it is done so beautifully because it’s so easy to make a character just like all of a sudden be gay.”
