Finn Wolfhard revealed in a new interview with Time magazine that he suffered a panic attack during the production of “Stranger Things 4,” given the show’s intense fandom, which at times has been “subconsciously terrifying” to handle.
Wolfhard plays Mike Wheeler on the blockbuster Netflix series, which kicks off its fifth and final season in November. The actor was just 13 years old when “Stranger Things” debuted and catapulted him to international fame.
“It’s just a symptom of what filmmaking can be, which is chaotic,” Wolfhard told the publication. “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. It was incredible and subconsciously terrifying to be 13 and all of the sudden everyone knows who you are.”
During the filming of “Stranger Things 4,” the pressures of fame collided with post-COVID production protocols. On top of that, Wolfhard “was having normal first-relationship struggles.” Halfway through a scene, he 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.”
Wolfhard’s co-stars, Caleb McLaughlin and Gaten Matarazzo, “pulled him aside and reassured him that they were feeling the same pressure,” Time writes.
The pressures didn’t ease as Wolfhard and the entire “Stranger Things” cast went into production on “Stranger Things 5.” The show’s series finale is bound to be one of the most scrutinized episodes in TV history.
As fans of shows like “Lost” and “Game of Thrones” know, a hugely divisive series finale can risk tainting the entire legacy of a show. “I think everyone was pretty worried, honestly,” Wolfhard told Time magazine. “The way that ‘Game of Thrones’ got torn to shreds in that final season, we’re all walking into this going, ‘We hope to not have that kind of thing happen.’ But then we read the scripts. We knew that it was something special.”
“Stranger Things” creators Matt and Ross Duffer told Variety in an exclusive cover story that they’ve had the endgame for the show planned for several years and have always been writing towards it, which will hopefully create a series finale that delivers the goods.
“We knew roughly what the end scene was for years. It wasn’t something we had a strain to come up with,” Matt said. “There were elements of it that were discussed for weeks, but the core idea of the ending, we had for a really long time.”
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/finn-wolfhard-stranger-things-5-backlash-game-of-thrones-1236554587/