Noah Schnapp, Will on Stranger Things, Comes Out as Gay

Actor Noah Schnapp of Stranger Things fame has come out as gay.

Schnapp, 18, came out in a TikTok video Thursday. He captioned the video, "I guess I'm more similar to Will than I thought," a reference to his Stranger Things character, gay teenager Will Byers, who is coming out as well.

"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,'" he wrote on the video, in which he lip-synchs to audio of a speaker saying, "You know what it never was? That serious. It was never that serious. Quite frankly, will never be that serious."

Stranger Things had dropped hints that his character is gay, but Schnapp and the rest of the show's team did not confirm anything until last summer. In July, after the last episodes of the show's fourth season debuted, Schnapp told Variety that Will is indeed gay and in love with his best friend, Mike.

"It was always kind of there, but you never really knew, is it just him growing up slower than his friends?" Schnapp said. "Now that he's gotten older, they made it a very real, obvious thing. Now it's 100 percent clear that he is gay and he does love Mike."

"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 told Variety. "People have come up to me -- 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. They are writing this real character and this real journey and real struggle and they're doing it so well."

There will be a fifth season of Stranger Things, and it will conclude the series. There's no word on when it will air.