What It’s Like to Grow Up on the Set of Stranger Things

Hollywood is full of child actors. But few get the chance to stick with one project, especially a blockbuster TV show, for nearly a decade. For a TIME cover story on the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, we spoke to six actors who were cast as preteens and teens and grew up on the Atlanta set of Netflix’s hit horror saga. The show, which premiered in 2016, follows the disappearance of a boy named Will Byers, a superpowered girl called Eleven, and their friends as they battle creatures from a parallel universe called the Upside Down—all while navigating the typical pressures of adolescence.

The actors found the experience to be at once fulfilling and high pressure. “It’s just a symptom of what filmmaking can be, which is chaotic,” says Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike. “As a child actor, you’re trying to make things easy for people. You don’t know how to speak up for yourself. You don’t know how to ask for a break.”

“No one else has had this life experience,” adds Noah Schnapp, who plays Will. There’s one exception: the young actors from the Harry Potter films. Schnapp even rewatched the entire Harry Potter series for inspiration while filming the final season of Stranger Things. “Their experience of growing up on set was exactly like ours. I would love, actually, to one day sit down with them and just talk and relate to each other.”

Showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer, were relatively green when they pitched the series to Netflix. They had only written for one show, Wayward Pines, before helming their own. Drawing inspiration from Steven Spielberg and Stephen King, they knew their story would center on kids—and they needed standout performances from their teen and tween actors. The brothers say they never saw themselves as parental figures to the cast; they were more like older brothers.

Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin, says the cast never thought of them as imposing adults. “They always spoke to us and worked with us as peers and not as superiors of any kind, even though they were our bosses. They always made sure that we were having fun and took us seriously,” he says. “I think that was essential to building our confidence early on in that process because most of the time, kids on set are seen, not heard.”

The young actors couldn’t have anticipated, when they signed up for the show, that millions of eyes would soon be on their work—and their social media. “It was incredible and subconsciously terrifying to be 13 and all of the sudden everyone knows who you are,” Wolfhard says. While filming Season 4, he began to feel overwhelmed: “I was having normal first-relationship struggles and juggling COVID and the show. Halfway through a scene I started hyperventilating. It was kind of like a fishbowl because a lot of the extras are fans. It culminated in sort of a panic attack.” Caleb McLaughlin, who plays Lucas, and Matarazzo reassured him that they were feeling the same stress.

The internet loves to joke that the “kids” who starred on the show aren’t kids anymore. Millie Bobby Brown, who plays Eleven, is married at 21. Schnapp, also 21, will soon graduate from college. Matarazzo, 23, and Sadie Sink, 23, have both been on Broadway. Wolfhard, 22, tours with his band, and McLaughlin, 24, has appeared in movies.

During our interviews, the Duffer brothers push back on this type of criticism. “You obviously see a lot of people complaining about how they seem a lot older. It doesn’t bother me at all,” says Matt. He points out that actors like Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton—who play older siblings to the show’s young crew—were in their early 20s when they were cast as high schoolers. “Most of [the kids] are 21 or 22, the same age as Nat and Charlie when they were playing sophomores in high school,” Matt adds.

Still, the production team planned around the challenge. “These kids do look like they’re in their early 20s,” says costume designer Amy Parris of dressing the kids for the final season. “There’s a sense of juvenile style in the prints, and the stripes are a little young and youthful…I do want them to still feel young, but I also don’t want it to feel like I’m dressing an adult like a child.”

The online chatter about growth spurts followed the actors onto set. Wolfhard recalls returning for Season 2 having undergone a growth spurt. “It was killing my career,” he jokes.

But growth—both literal and emotional—has ultimately helped the Stranger Things cast. When asked at the TIME cover shoot about the biggest difference between filming Season 1 and Season 5, Brown said, while laughing: “We got along! We stopped fighting.”

Complicated visual effects and episodes that clock in at well over an hour translated to a 48-week-long shoot. The actors spent that time celebrating birthdays, Thanksgiving, and other major milestones together. They rented houses in the same neighborhood so they could walk to each other’s places. When I visited the set in the summer of 2024, several cast and crew members had just made a trip to an Atlanta cinema to catch Twisters.

“We would play video games. Finn hosted a Canadian Thanksgiving at one point,” says Sink, who plays Max. “It was really great to be bored and on a week off and just be like, ‘Oh, all my friends live within a block of me so I could go hang out with any one of them.’”

McLaughlin adds that when the cast are together, they revert to their younger selves. “When I get on set, we’re doing these jokes from when we were, like, 12 years old,” he says. “It’s easy because we grew up together.”

Occasionally after a late shoot, they’d head to a bar together. “Yes,” says Sink. “It might be crazy for some people to hear, but we’re old enough to drink now.”

At least one of the actors felt so comfortable under the Netflix umbrella that she opted to build her career there. Brown, whose production company has a deal with Netflix, has become one of the platform’s biggest stars, appearing in popular films like Enola Holmes and Damsel. Rather than focusing on theatrical-first releases, she continues to grow her fanbase on the streaming service. “Why leave something that feels like a supportive family?” she asks. “I kind of was raised by that studio. So they’re my home studio.”

As Brown and the other stars have grown in profile, they have had to navigate shaping their identities as public figures under intense scrutiny. For Schnapp, the spotlight has been particularly complicated because of an important connection between his character and his real life. Will came out as gay last season, and Schnapp himself came out at 18—but only after spending years struggling to answer questions from journalists about his sexuality. “When I was younger, I was obviously very scared of talking about it,” he says. “They would pry and ask me, ‘Is he gay? Are you gay?’ I was 12, 13. I didn’t know what to say.”

He’s not the only actor who has struggled to untangle character from personhood after spending such a long time on one production. Matarazzo joins me on Zoom from the set of another film. He says he’s actively trying to find roles that stretch him beyond the goofy but loyal nerd he’s played most of his life. “I’ll never be able to play a person that I know like the back of my hand,” he says. “I go to other projects and I’m like, I don’t know if this is a Gaten choice, or this is a Dustin choice. Is this just how I act?”

Balancing acting opportunities outside Stranger Things became increasingly challenging as the seasons and shoots grew longer. “If you’re not able to get other opportunities to work on another project it’s because you’re working on something that you hold to your heart, and you know, there’s something that has been great and a blessing in your life,” says McLaughlin.

On the final day of filming, the actor says he felt pleased not only with his storyline but with his tenure on the show. “It was a very satisfying ending for my character and for me, Caleb. I didn’t leave with any questions. I felt like I had great closure,” he says. “I cried so much. But they were happy tears.”

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