Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp was asked to speak in a higher pitch to hide the effects of puberty while his character, Will, was still a child in Netflix’s hit series. In an interview for Flaunt, Schnapp remembers how the main cast’s puberty imposed some challenges to production, since time moved slower in Stranger Things than in real life.
When Stranger Things was released, in 2016, the leading cast of children was perfectly aged to play seventh graders. However, since each subsequent season of Stranger Things took a long time to be produced, the cast aged faster than their characters. And so it comes that Schnapp is turning 18 next month, while Will is only 14 or 15 years old in the series. And while three years don’t make such a massive difference for adults, children change significantly in a short period, leading to a chaotic production. So, during one season, a producer had to ask Schnapp to force his voice to come out in a higher pitch. As Schnapp tells it:
“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. 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.’”
As Stranger Things’ young cast gets closer to exiting their teen years, their bodies will change considerably less. Even so, the age difference was already evident in Season 4, as almost every primary child looked older than they should be. However, does it matter? The most important is that the cast keeps acting their hearts out and bringing us all into tears. The numbers also indicate people don’t care about the age difference much, as Season 4 broke several Netflix records, with more than one billion hours already consumed by fans for the whole series.
Netflix knows that Stranger Things’ creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, developed an unstoppable money-making machine. That’s why the streaming platform is already planning Stranger Things spinoffs to keep us hooked in Hawkins. Besides that, the Duffer Brothers recently signed a deal with Netflix to helm multiple TV projects in the near future, including a live-action Death Note series and an adaption of The Tasliman, the 1984 novel written by Stephen King and Peter Straub.
All four seasons of Stranger Things are available on Netflix right now. Check out our interview with stars Schnapp, Sadie Sink, and Caleb McLaughlin:
