Noah Schnapp

He auditioned for Mike Wheeler and didn't get it. What he got instead was Will Byers, a character who spends most of the first season absent, trapped in a parallel dimension the audience never enters. That absence turned out to be the hook. When Schnapp finally had scenes to play in Season 2, he was 13 and carrying a show about demonic possession with the cast treating him like a peer. He'd already voiced Charlie Brown in The Peanuts Movie in 2015, but Stranger Things made him a face, not just a voice.

TBH, his snack brand launched when he was 17, raised over $700,000 in crowdfunding and landed in more than 2,500 stores including Whole Foods while he was still filming Stranger Things. He's at Wharton studying entrepreneurship, graduating in 2026. In late 2023, a video of him holding "Zionism is Sexy" stickers surfaced during the Israel-Hamas conflict. Boycotts followed. He posted a clarifying TikTok in January 2024. The show concluded in 2025. Whether the controversy follows him into the next phase is an open question, but the business portfolio suggests he's not waiting to find out.

He came out as gay on TikTok in January 2023 with a lip-sync clip captioned "I guess I'm more similar to Will than I thought," six months after publicly confirming his character was gay and in love with Mike. He's said that playing Will helped him accept his own sexuality. His personal coming-out and his character's ran on roughly the same timeline, which is the kind of thing that would feel contrived in a screenplay. He's 21, at Wharton, running a snack company, and arguably the most eventful person from that cast.