Finn Wolfhard Is Ready for Life After ‘Stranger Things’

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It’s a little past noon when Finn Wolfhard and I meet up at a tourist-favorite, all-day-brunch spot just off Central Park, a place where strollers pile up by the door, and inside things are moving at an off-peak pace. This is an odd and luxurious time to eat an omelet in Manhattan. When Wolfhard arrives, sporting a boxy jacket and a shaggy haircut, we acknowledge this feeling like a liminal space. Usually, when he visits the city, he hangs out with friends in Brooklyn. 

There’s lots to discuss—a couple new movies, ongoing musical side gigs, the anticipated end of a very popular Netflix show—but within half an hour, we’re talking about panic attacks. I’m reminded of the surrealness of our circumstances, when a man, very sweetly, comes up to our table to tell Finn: “My daughter’s in love with you.”

Wolfhard laughs and agrees to take a photo after our interview is over. He seems a little sheepish, if only because I’m observing the interaction; I am personally surprised it didn’t happen sooner. Glancing down at my recorder, I see we’d made it 32 minutes. “Not bad,” he says.

The actor just turned 20 in December, and he started having routine panic attacks when he was 15 or 16—a few years into his adolescence-spanning role as Mike Wheeler on the smash streaming series Stranger Things, which premiered a lifetime ago (2016) when he was 13. In those early years, everything felt completely fine and thus Wolfhard “did not talk about anything, because I just was having this crazy whirlwind career, so there was no time, or at least we didn’t feel [there was] at the time.. Everyone was like, ‘Look at him, he’s fine. He’s having the best time,’” he explains. “But in reality, I was probably also developing and things were happening in my brain and anxieties were forming and things that I didn’t realize that I had to bury because of how I had to feel at work.”

Wolfhard recalled a panic attack he had on the set of his latest film, When You Finish Saving The World, the Jesse Eisenberg written-and-directed drama from A24 which released about a week ago. “I was so uptight and nervous about it, because I just was like, ‘This is the first movie [that I’m doing] as an adult,’” he tells me. In turn, Eisenberg—who, like Wolfhard, has been in the business since he was a teenager—told him about the time he had a panic attack mid-take while filming the 2009 movie Adventureland, and how director Greg Mottola pulled him aside to reassure him then that, ultimately, acting is a very weird thing to do.