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It’s been almost a full year since Finn Wolfhard stepped off the set of Stranger Things for the very last time, marking an end to the Netflix series’ epic nine-year run and a bittersweet farewell to the role that raised him. In the months since, the SAG award–winning actor has brazenly charted a course that’s all his own with the June release of his inaugural solo studio album Happy Birthday, a corresponding tour across North America and Europe, and his directorial debut with the film Hell of a Summer.
Wolfhard was just 12 when he was cast as Mike Wheeler, the de facto ringleader of the “core four” made up of Mike, Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), and Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and the love interest of Millie Bobby Brown‘s Eleven. Five seasons and nearly a decade later, the time has finally come for the trailblazing TV series that launched the careers of its young cast to reach its finale. Although Wolfhard and his costars had a year of filming to wrap their heads around this chapter of their lives coming to a close, it wasn’t until the very last day of shooting that reality finally sunk in for Wolfhard.
Perched on an armchair in the corner of his Toronto hotel room, Wolfhard blinks onto my screen clad in a graphic T-shirt and jeans. In the midst of his The Objection! Tour and fresh off a slew of East Coast shows, the multi-hyphenate joins our Zoom call on a Saturday morning during a moment of downtime, something that will become increasingly more rare as the global press tour for Stranger Things kicks off this month.
“It was the first time in 10 years when everyone came to the set to watch and hang out,” he recalls of that final day of shooting season 5. “I mean the whole crew, administrative department, and people from Netflix. It was this incredible moment.”
The rest of his castmates wrapped their scenes earlier, and all eyes were fixed on Wolfhard’s last moments as Mike. “I looked around and saw so many people I had never met before just because of how massive the production was. My whole life was flashing before my eyes,” he says. It’s hard to fully grasp the impact a project as formative as Stranger Things will eventually have on his life, but with the wide-eyed clarity of someone double his age, Wolfhard simply reflects, “I don’t think I’ll ever have any experience like that ever again.”
The cultural significance of Stranger Things is a once-in-a-generation phenomenon. Not only did the series break records for the most viewing hours for any English-language series on Netflix, but it also won over a hundred awards, launched the careers of many of its castmembers, and set a new standard for the modern sci-fi genre.
With season 5 quickly approaching (the eight episodes will be released in three installments throughout the end of the year, and the final episode is also being released in theaters), the Hawkins crew and their mission to defeat Vecna culminates in what is already set to be the most highly anticipated season yet. “More than in any season we’ve ever seen him in, except for maybe the first one, [Mike] is on a mission,” Wolfhard shares when I press him for any plot details he’s able to divulge. “He’s devoted himself to killing Vecna and saving his town and his friends. I’m really happy and proud of his character arc. He takes a little more control in this season.” Wolfhard’s already gotten to watch a few episodes back with his castmates, but even reading the script and seeing some of the footage, he insists, “I think that it has one of the greatest last episodes of any show.”
(Image credit: Who What Wear)
The kids of Hawkins may be going on their last adventure, but off-screen, the friendships that Wolfhard and his castmates have cultivated will continue to live on. “I remember driving away from the set,” he recalls of that eventful day, Mike Wheeler’s bike, a poster of The Thing, and the original demogorgon piece as his souvenirs in tow. “Sadie Sink was in the back seat, Gaten [Matarazzo] was driving, and I was in the front seat. I turned around and asked Sadie, ‘Will it feel this sad forever?’ She was like, ‘Just give it a few days. You’ll be fine.’” Ultimately, Sink was right. The sharpness of the goodbye did eventually fade, but for Wolfhard, there may always be a Stranger Things–sized hole in his life. How could there be anything less? When Wolfhard and his castmates stepped onto the set, many of them hadn’t even hit puberty, and by the time the cameras ceased rolling, they were already of legal drinking age.
At 22, many of us were preparing to make the transition from college to the “real world” while Wolfhard and his peers were suddenly grappling with being thrust from their tight-knit cocoon into the great unknown of a post–Stranger Things world. Where many 20-somethings share their memories of the past four years with their closest friends, the cast’s bonds go much deeper. “There was something about going at it with the Stranger Things cast where we all understood what the last 10 years has meant to us,” Wolfhard tells me. Each of them has essentially grown up in the spotlight, but their superpower is that they’ve never had to truly do it alone. “I’ve never had a love for a group of people that’s this strong,” he continues. “From when the show first came out, there was stuff that even my biological family can’t relate to that these Stranger Things guys can.” Fear, excitement, nostalgia, and nerves all bubbled up when it came time to say their final goodbyes. “I definitely felt some separation anxiety,” he confirms.
(Image credit: Who What Wear)
These days, Wolfhard may be moving on from slaying demogorgons and uncovering top-secret government operations, but he’s still on a mission, albeit a slightly different one: to make music and reestablish himself in Hollywood beyond the role that launched him to streaming acclaim. Earlier this year in June, Wolfhard released his solo debut album, Happy Birthday, and has since been performing on tour throughout the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The album—which explores themes of identity, anxiety, and coming of age—is filtered through a distinctly ’90s- and 2000s-era sound, andWolfhard cites sonic influences from The Smiths to early The Beatles. It’s all raw, lo-fi alt-rock that feels at once nostalgic and intimate. Critics have praised Wolfhard’s ability to pay homage to his influences without ceding any originality.
When career actors try their hands at another medium like music, it can often feel like watching a dog walk on its hind legs—potentially awkward at first. But real Wolfhard fans know that this is far from his first musical act. Wolfhard fronted the Vancouver-based indie group Calpurnia from 2017 to 2019 before joining forces with friend and former Calpurnia drummer Malcolm Craig to form The Aubreys, the duo’s psych-rock project that has been producing ’90s-inflected tracks ever since. Wolfhard’s film and music lives don’t always converge, but one instance of their overlap came with The Aubreys’ track “Getting Better (otherwise),” which was released on the soundtrack for the 2020 horror film The Turning, also starring Wolfhard.
He’s hardly the first of the Stranger Things cast to pursue a career in music, though. Djo aka Joe Keery aka the show’s jock heartthrob Steve Harrington has managed to establish himself as a respected recording artist, and his presence on set quickly became somewhat of a North Star for Wolfhard. “Meeting [Keery] at age 11 or 12 and seeing him acting while also being an amazing musician opened my mind,” Wolfhard tells me. “‘Oh, you can do it all.’”
If Keery’s pseudonym Djo was aimed to distance his musical career from his acting, Wolfhard appears to be unfussed about deploying his full name and the association that comes with it. When I ask him about his legacy, it’s refreshingly realistic. “I think I’ll always be remembered as an actor, even if I do accomplish as much as I want to in music, because of how seminal Stranger Things was,” he says. Who’s to say that 10 or 20 years from now the name Finn Wolfhard won’t instead be synonymous with “musician” or even perhaps “screenwriter” or “director”? With the way Wolfhard moves through the world, he makes it seem like anything can be possible—not with the dreamy naïveté of the average 22-year-old with big dreams but instead with a kind of precocious wisdom that comes from his decade-plus of professional experience.
There’s no escaping the public analysis of coming of age in the spotlight, but for Wolfhard’s part, he’s managed to channel his fears and anxieties into his solo music career through songwriting, recording in the studio, and even touring. “I was 18, 19 the first time I had a really hard mental health period in my life. It was the first time where I thought that people could like me in a way that was not transactional. I remember asking my parents, ‘If I don’t want to do music or acting, will people still love me?’ I had never given myself the time to even ask that question of, Who am I without this thing? So all this was happening at the same time as me writing this album,” he says.
Even the title Happy Birthday is a reference to the start of a new life chapter. “That’s how I approached every song,” he shares. “I was trying to base them around these big questions that I had around who I am as a person.” On the track “Objection!,” for instance, Wolfhard tells me that it was an exploration of his emotional state in the aftermath of a breakup without being about the breakup at all. “It’s really about the way that I react to life and how I notice things about myself. I ask those questions within the song. Why did you react in that way? And why did it affect you in the way that it did?” he says. It’s easily his most personal project to date, and while putting it together, he famously set a goal of writing 50 songs—not to include each one on the album but to fine-tune his creative process. He wanted to manufacture creativity instead of waiting for it to simply strike, a process any seasoned writer is familiar with. “I was almost militantly interrogating myself” is how he puts it.
(Image credit: Who What Wear)
Of course, there’s also his directorial debut. While some actors will wait until they are near the middle of their careers to attempt calling the shots from the director’s chair, Wolfhard is hungry to expand his skill set. This April, he cowrote and codirected the campy slasher flick Hell of a Summer with fellow actor Billy Bryk—the pair met on the set of 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife and have remained close friends and collaborators since. Set against the backdrop of a sleepaway camp, the film pokes fun at the ’80s summer camp genre with all the trappings of a campy classic: nostalgia, suspense, and perfectly timed comedic relief.
As Wolfhard has already accomplished so much by his early 20, naturally, I was curious to know what comes next for the star. He’s well aware that few things can stand in the shadow of a behemoth like Stranger Things but is choosing not to let the pressure to book another major role get to him. “I’m 22 years old—I’m not in a rush to jump into anything just to say that I’m acting. I don’t care if it has to come after a while. I want to do something that is, in some way, personal to me,” he says. I get the sense that this isn’t the first time he’s been asked about his next moves, and with his rising star power, it won’t be the last. “I’ve thought about doing something that is different to how people see me outside [of Stranger Things] and defying expectations,” he admits, stopping short of divulging any plans further than that. Wolfhard, I’m realizing, has no desire to bend to Hollywood’s will. Why should he? He’s already proved his creative prowess in multiple mediums with a remarkable level of effortlessness. Right now, the world is his oyster.
“I would love to just be in weird independent movies, even if I were to be in one scene of a Steven Soderbergh movie,” he considers. “I don’t care if it’s a big role. I just want to be able to work with cool people.” At least for now, the pressure to hit another Stranger Things–level jackpot is off.
Now a director, screenwriter, and singer-songwriter, Wolfhard is establishing himself as a modern-day renaissance man, sharpening each of his creative pursuits like they’re tools on a Swiss Army knife. The question isn’t what he’ll get up to next—it’s what won’t he.
Photographer: Max Montgomery
Stylist: Nico Amarca
Groomer: Ruth Fernandez
Creative Director: Amy Armani
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Lindsay Ferro
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anna.laplaca@futurenet.com (Anna LaPlaca)
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