Stranger Things has never been especially subtle about the sexuality of Noah Schnapp’s character Will Byers; hints that he was gay (and closeted) first popped up as early as the show’s first season, and have steadily increased until season 4, when he all but spells out his love for his best friend, Mike, in an emotional late-season conversation. Even so, Schnapp has now given an interview to Variety this week in which he lays out Will’s identity for the subtext-deficient in the audience, who somehow weren’t picking up what the show was very clearly putting down, i.e., “It’s 100% clear that he is gay and he does love Mike.”
To be fair, Schnapp was less forthright about Will’s sexuality earlier this year, when, in May, he declared that it was “up to the audience’s interpretation.” Now, though, he clarifies that a) he was trying to avoid spoiling the rest of the upcoming season, which was released in two parts this year, and b) that he didn’t want to say anything that would later turn out to be untrue, since series creators Matt and Ross Duffer actually don’t tell him much about their future plans for plot points or character beats: “They obviously don’t tell me anything, either. I’m always spoiling stuff, so they will never share anything with me. So it’s a lot of figuring it out on my own.”
During the conversation, Schnapp also touched on the emotional scene in which Will indirectly lays out his feelings for Mike, framing his emotions as the hypothetical feelings of his adopted sister, Eleven. He also reveals that a follow-up scene, in which Will’s brother Jonathan offers him acceptance, wasn’t originally in the show’s script, but was added by the Duffers after seeing Schnapp and Charlie Heaton’s performances. “They were like, we need a scene with that. So they wrote it as we were filming.”
