NEW YORK – Noah Schnapp was at sleepaway camp when Season 1 of “Stranger Things” dropped on Netflix in summer 2016.
“You don’t have your phone and you’re not part of the real world – you get three calls with your parents every summer,” Schnapp, 21, recalls over a laid-back game of Jenga at a Union Square café. But gradually, “I remember my mom sending me emails being like, ‘Noah, you have a fan page and you hit 10,000 followers!’ I was like, what?!”
Nine years and nearly 24 million Instagram followers later, Schnapp is getting ready to say goodbye to Will Byers, the floppy-haired youngster he’s inhabited for five seasons of sci-fi phenomenon “Stranger Things.”
As we sit beneath shelves lined with Magic: The Gathering and Warhammer Quest, the young actor is oscillating between excitement and good-natured panic: After three new episodes on Christmas Day, “Stranger Things” ends with a supersized finale Dec. 31. And in the spring, Schnapp will graduate from University of Pennsylvania, where he studies film.
“I keep going through these cycles of, ‘Oh, my life is over! I’m going to be so sad!’” Schnapp says. “But then it’s like, ‘Oh, anything could happen now!’ If we had another season of ‘Stranger Things,’ it would just be so tired. This is the perfect time to end it, and it’s a nice, fresh start for next year.”
