After spending 18 years being "scared in the closet," Noah Schnapp has come out as gay.
The actor, best known for playing the closeted gay teenager Will Byers on "Stranger Things," made the announcement Thursday in a TikTok video captioned: "I guess I'm more similar to Will than I thought."
The video features Schnapp reclining and lip-syncing to audio saying, "You know what it never was? That serious. Quite frankly, it will never be that serious."
In text atop the video, Schnapp wrote, "When I finally told my friends and family I was gay after being scared in the closet for 18 years and all they said was 'we know.'"
For years there has been much discussion among "Stranger Things" fans over the sexual orientation of Schnapp's TV alter ego, with the actor confirming in an interview with Variety last summer that Will is gay and in love with his best friend Mike (Finn Wolfhard).
"It was always kind of there, but you never really knew, is it just him growing up slower than his friends? Now that he's gotten older, they made it a very real, obvious thing," he said. "Now it's 100% clear that he is gay, and he does love Mike. But before, 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."
Schnapp said he had been approached by people in the past who felt like they could connect with his character. Among them was a man from Paris whose comments stood out to the actor.
"I was just in Paris and this, like, 40-year-old man came up to me and he was like, 'Wow, this Will character made me feel so good. And I related to it so much. That is exactly who I was when I was a kid.' That just made me so happy to hear," he said. "They are writing this real character and this real journey and real struggle and they're doing it so well."