“I don’t know what to tell you. My voice is dropping. I don’t sound young anymore.”
Noah Schnapp revealed that the producers of “Stranger Things” aren’t always happy about filming a show with a rapidly-aging cast.
The Netflix hit debuted its first season back in 2016, when its core cast members ranged in age from 12 to 14-years-old, initially matching the ages of their adolescent characters. With each season requiring at least two years to develop, the show’s timeline has moved slower than they’ve all aged, leading to a unique set of problems.
During an interview with Flaunt, Schnapp — who is almost 18 but played around 15 as Will Byers on the most recent season — detailed the challenges producers faced when the young actors hit puberty.
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“It was the peak time of change, and puberty and growing up and just everything was changing with all of us, and the directors were just not loving it,” Schnapp shared with the publication. “And I remember one of the producers coming up to me and telling me, ‘Noah, is there any way you could just speak in a higher tone and just slouch a little bit? Like, we need you to keep that Season 1 innocence that you had.'”
“That was like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you. My voice is dropping. I don’t sound young anymore,'” he added.
Show creators, the Duffer Brothers, have previously addressed the issue of the actors aging past their characters. In an interview with TV Line alongside his brother and series co-creator Matt Duffer, Ross Duffer revealed he was “sure” there would be a time jump between the fourth and fifth seasons of the show to help close the gap between the stars and their characters.
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“I’m sure we will do a time jump,” Ross explained. “Ideally, we’d have shot [Seasons 4 and 5] back to back, but there was just no feasible way to do that.”
“So these are all discussions we’re going to have with our writers when we start the room up,” he continued.
Though the brothers haven’t set a date to start shooting the highly-anticipated final season, they say that a lot of the storyline is “pretty well mapped out.”
“The ending is the hard thing,” added Matt. “That’s obviously the stressful thing. We really want to stick the landing.”
