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Noah Schnapp Praises Will's Stranger Things Storyline, Teases Season 5
Schnapp called Will's coming out journey "beautifully written."
Stranger Things fans waited eagerly — and impatiently — for years to see if the narrative would eventually have young Will Byers come out of the closet. Season four made it clear where Will’s heart lies, and actor Noah Schnapp has continued to praise his character’s ongoing journey, discussing it once again in a recent interview with Us Weekly.
“I think it’s beautifully written,” he said. “They’ve had this vision for a long time, which you can tell even from season 1 how they wrote it with his character and how he was bullied and being called a fairy and all the way up from season 1 up until now. They’ve had this story line kind of in the works and I think their vision has been working really well.”
A pitch document detailing the Duffer Brothers’ original conceit for Stranger Things (then titled Montauk), suggested they had always planned for Will to be gay. Considering the young ages of the main characters at the start of the show, it made sense for him to come to terms with his sexuality — and his romantic interest for his best friend Mike (Finn Wolfhard) — over time.
The fourth and most recent season made Will’s feelings clear to the audience, even as he was only starting to grasp them himself.
And though some fans, afraid of being queerbaited, expressed impatience with the slowly unfurling storyline, Schnapp repeatedly defended how things were playing out.
“First of all it’s the 80s and the kids a FRESHMAN in hs,” he wrote to a fan partway through season four. “Let them slowly develop the plot and when he does come out it will be really special and real.”
Where things go for Will from here remains a mystery, even to Schnapp himself, who admitted the Duffer Brothers haven’t spilled the details on his arc for the final season. Although he acknowledges fans want a happily ever after for Will and Mike, the latter has thus far been invested in his own romantic relationship with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), often at the expense of his best friend’s feelings.
“I just think in season 5, we’re all hoping that Will kind of fully embraces who he is and that we get to see that,” Schnapp said. “And I think that’s the most important, at least for me.”
Stranger Things will eventually return for a fifth and final season, although details are currently scarce.
Stranger Things is rated TV-14 and is probably not advisable for younger audiences due to the horror elements.
Stranger Things is set in the 1980s in Hawkins, Indiana.
Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
