In a new interview with Time magazine, Finn Wolfhard revealed that he suffered from panic attacks while working on Stranger Things 4, given the show’s rabid fan base, which he said sometimes “involuntarily frightened” him. Wolfhard plays Mike Wheeler on the hit Netflix series, which will begin its fifth and final season in November. The actor was only 13 years old when “Stranger Things” premiered. To international fame.
“This is just a symptom of a chaotic filmmaking situation,” Wolfhard told the magazine. “As a child actor, you try to make things easy for people. You don’t know how to advocate for yourself. You don’t know how to ask for a break… It was incredible and subconsciously scary for everyone to suddenly know who you are at 13 years old.”
During the filming of Stranger Things 4, the pressures of fame collided with post-COVID-19 production protocols, with Wolfhard also having “a normal struggle with first meetings… I hyperventilated in the middle of a scene. A lot of the extras were fans, so it was like a fishbowl. It culminated in a kind of panic attack.”
Wolfhard’s co-stars, Caleb McLaughlin and Gaten Matarazzo, “pulled Wolfhard aside and reassured him that they were feeling the same pressures,” Time wrote.
Whatever the pressure was for Wolfhard and the entire Stranger Things cast, the pressure only intensified as production began on Stranger Things 5. The show’s series finale is sure to be one of the most scrutinized episodes in television history. As fans of shows like “Lost” and “Game of Thrones” know, highly divisive series finales risk tarnishing a show’s entire legacy.
“Honestly, I think everyone was pretty worried,” Wolfhard told Time magazine. “Like Game of Thrones was torn to shreds in that final season, we’re all in a situation where we’re like, ‘I hope that doesn’t happen.’ But then we read the script. We knew it was something special.”
Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer told Variety in an exclusive cover story that they have been planning the show’s endgame for years, have been constantly writing for it, and are hopeful of crafting a successful series finale.
“We’ve known roughly what the ending scene was for years, and it wasn’t something we had a hard time coming up with,” Matt said. “There were elements that had been discussed for weeks, but the core idea of the ending was something I had been thinking about for a really long time.”
Stranger Things 5 begins with Volume 1. November 26th.
