“You have to answer your email,” Finn Wolfhard’s father tells him. The young actor is home in Vancouver in 2017 for a break after filming IT and Stranger Things season 2 back-to-back. In another life, he’d be preparing to enter high school or searching for a summer job that would pay him enough cash to take his crush on a date to the mall. Instead, he’s hearing it from his father for neglecting an email from his agent. Wolfhard is just fourteen years old, and he’s having trouble articulating to his parents that he just wants to pretend like he’s a normal kid—if only for a day.
Eventually, the two sides formed an unwritten parent-child handbook for navigating Hollywood in your teens. Wolfhard’s parents were always supportive—that was never the problem. His dad always said, “If you were a math geek, I would have driven you to whatever mathletes thing.” But from the very first second that Stranger Things hit Netflix in 2016, Wolfhard’s father wasn’t driving him to math competitions—it was more like television premieres and film festivals.
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“No one can prepare anyone for it,” Wolfhard, now twenty-three, tells me about becoming a child star in the streaming age. “It was incredibly exciting, and it still is, but there was a period in my teenage years where it was just hard. I wanted the people in my life to just be chill.”
During the most formative years of his life, Wolfhard filmed five seasons of one of the most popular television shows on the planet: Stranger Things. He played Mike Wheeler, the leader of a group of kids in a suburban sci-fi story and the one person who inspires everyone to work together to fight their greatest obstacles. During that time, Wolfhard also starred in two IT movies, two Ghostbusters sequels, and an indie Sundance flick directed by Jesse Eisenberg. He codirected his own film—a teen summer-camp slasher called Hell of a Summer—which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023.
Off-screen, he wrote an album as a solo artist, titled Happy Birthday, and he even helmed a stop-motion music video for the George Harrison estate, all before he turned twenty-three just a week ago, on December 22. It’s a testament to how—even at such a young age—Wolfhard refused to let the world pigeonhole him as Mike Wheeler. “There shouldn’t be a limit to what you’re curious about,” he says.
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When we meet in early December, Wolfhard is wrapping up a photo shoot at the Esquire office in New York City, where he donned a knight’s helmet—a nod to Mike Wheeler’s Dungeons & Dragons class in Stranger Things. It’s been a crazy day. He’s in his seventh time zone in under a month as he promotes the fifth and final season of Stranger Things across the globe. It’s dizzying just to think about, but he’s traveled from London to Italy to Los Angeles, back to London, Berlin, Japan, and now New York in roughly thirty days. The night before we talk, he performed his song “Trailers after dark” live on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and tried his best not to spoil anything that happens in the Stranger Things finale, which debuted on Netflix just before the Times Square Ball dropped Wednesday evening.
The culminating episode of the Netflix series had a lot of ground to cover, as the kids of Hawkins, Indiana, underwent the final fight against the powerful villain, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower). There was little for Wolfhard to say about the end until everyone had seen it, but rest assured: he gives one of the finale’s best performances, bringing Mike Wheeler’s story full circle. He’s even the final face we see on screen, and it feels right. Wolfhard is incredibly proud of the work they’ve done, and when we speak, he’s excited to witness this lifelong project reach its conclusion.
“There’s a lot of sadness that comes along with it, because it was our lives for so long—it’s like our school, our childhood,” Wolfhard tells me. “I’m someone who is a natural optimist that believes that everything will go the way that it should, but I also have the tendency to not experience things in the moment so that I can prepare for future things. This is a very big transitional period, so it’s terrifying. But I think it’s all going to go the way that it should.”
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Even though Wolfhard isn’t certain of what exactly comes next after Stranger Things, he lights up when he starts talking about his true passion: movies. Throughout every family-supper tiff about keeping his escalating fame as normal as possible, the one constant in the Wolfhard household was a shared love of film. Wolfhard bonds with his Stranger Things costars Joe Keery and Charlie Heaton about being freewheeling multi-hyphenates with a deep appreciation of the art that preceded their own. But it might be Wolfhard—the youngest among them—who has the oldest soul. He reveres the Beatles for their multimedia approach to art, and he lists sixties films like Ken Loach’s coming-of-age drama Kes as among his favorite movies of all time.
“I don’t know if I’m a rare case or anything, but I do think if you were to pick out from my high school class of who was into independent film from the seventies, it probably wouldn’t have been a lot of people,” says Wolfhard.
After diving through Wes Anderson’s filmography, he toured British films of the sixties and seventies—where he found Kes. He recounts Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale, as well as campy horror classics such as Shaun of the Dead and even teen comedies like Superbad. Seth Rogen went to high school near his house in Vancouver, and Wolfhard has always looked up to the hometown hero. “I remember hearing when I was maybe nine or ten that Superbad was started by thirteen-year-olds,” Wolfhard says. I was like, Oh, I can do this.”
Of course, that’s an early age to know exactly what you want to do when you grow up. But according to Wolfhard, he was fully immersed already. He recalls a documentary his parents showed him about special-effects designer Greg Nicotero, who worked on Day of the Dead and Predator with a crew of his closest friends. For Wolfhard, that was the dream. “I would just watch it over and over and over again, so maybe I was a little more of an obsessive for my age,” he admits.
Wolfhard found that combination of creative success and close friendships for himself in Stranger Things. He lived with his costar Gaten Matarazzo during the filming of season 5. Their messy apartment was as close to simulating a college dorm as you could get for young TV stars. He shared endless movie nights with Keery and Heaton, and he grew incredibly close to a family of “kids,” as they call each other, who were all aboard the same rocket ship to fame.
For Wolfhard, the final day of shooting Stranger Things was like a snapshot of their entire childhood. All the kids were surrounded by their parents, who rarely showed up on set for season 5. And with each turning of the page on the final script, it was like watching another chapter of his life come to an end.
“It just really reminded me of why I got into acting in the first place and why I love making films,” Wolfhard says. “I was lucky to be a part of a really tight-knit family that enjoyed making stuff together. It just reminded me that at the heart of this show, even though it’s like the biggest season yet, these are all the same people that I’ve always known, and this is why I love the show so much.”
Rona Liana Ahdout
Rona Liana Ahdout
Once the Stranger Things press tour finally wraps up, Wolfhard plans to embark on another project close to home. He reveals that he’s writing a film about the rock band the Replacements with his father. Eric Wolfhard, a lawyer and researcher who focuses on aboriginal land claims, was also once a screenwriter for the Gersh Agency in Los Angeles. He grew up around the same time as the band, and he spent his childhood touring America as the youngest person on his cycling team. So according to Finn, he didn’t really know how much his father actually understood what he was going through until they started working together.
“Their bassist, Tommy Stinson, started in that band when he was really young—probably eleven years old,” says Wolfhard. “Ultimately, the band had a lot of turmoil and trauma in their lives, and it was not healthy, but there’s something incredibly relatable there—just being a kid in the adult world.”
Wolfhard doesn’t know if the film will ever see the light of day, but the experience so far has brought him and his father closer together than ever before. If anything, it’s provided the Wolfhards a more exciting reason to talk about responding to his agent’s emails about what’s next.
Below, Wolfhard shares more about what he’s working on after Stranger Things, his character’s recent reappearance in the IT: Welcome to Derry finale, and how he feels about streaming’s potential takeover of the film industry.
ESQUIRE: Have you ever come close to spoiling something about Stranger Things?
FINN WOLFHARD: I met someone at an ice cream place yesterday and they asked me, “Who dies?” I just said [the name of] a character, but they don’t die. I just thought, Start tricking people. Then they’re like, “Is that true?” And I was like, “No. Why would I do that?”
That’s a good way to skirt around it. Give crazy answers until they don’t trust you—so they stop asking.
Plus, it sounds fake. If you were to say, “Oh, I met so-and-so at Van Leeuwen Ice Cream and they told me so-and so-died,” they’d be like, “Shut up. That’s not true.”
As someone who starred in one of the biggest streaming shows ever but also loves classic films, how do you feel about the “Streaming is the end of movies as we know it” talk?
I don’t think streaming is the end of movies. Streaming can be incredible, but there’s nothing like seeing a movie in a theater. It’s a communal experience and I do believe that if theaters go away, it’s not going to be as fun of a world. Going to the movies is something that makes you feel like you’re not alone, and when everything is condensed into one thing on your TV, it amplifies antisocial life. We’re at a huge transitional period for the industry. Stranger Things is ending and Netflix is about to buy Warner Bros., and I don’t know what that’s going to look like. Consolidating and trying to have a monopoly on film is not going to work. Streaming is amazing and streaming should be able to have a place, but it shouldn’t be killing theaters.
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Did you know that a photo of your character from IT would appear in the IT: Welcome to Derry season 1 finale?
I knew that years ago, actually. When they first started thinking about that show, it was probably 2021. Barbara and Andy Muschietti both told me, “You’re involved.” Yeah, I’m connected. I think there’s something else that will come up eventually that I’m excited for people to see.
How did you convince people to fund Hell of a Summer, your directorial debut, when you were nineteen years old?
A lot of it was just convincing people that we knew what we were doing. Our pitch, which is the thing that ended up working in the end, was like, “It’s a movie about kids our age, so who knows these teenagers more than teenagers?” For a lot of people, that did not work, but for some people it did. It’s a miracle that that thing got made. I started that movie when I was sixteen and Billy [Bryk] was probably eighteen or nineteen. We made it when I was twenty, and then it came out this year. So it was my life for a long time. We didn’t have a production company. We didn’t have a producer fielding calls for us. It was just us convincing everyone that we can make this, basically until Neon picked it up.
And now you’re working on another movie together, Crash Land.
Yeah. We finished that. It’s about a young group of farm boys in Canada who are basically self-proclaimed stuntmen, and they kind of just film each other doing stunts, Jackass style. We got to go just shoot this really fun thing in Canada and be the producers on it. It was such a blast. We’re hoping to go to festival next year.
How much does the reception to something you made affect you?
Usually, I just make something and move on to the next thing. Obviously, a bad review or a shitty comment, of course, that would hurt anyone. But I’m also not obsessing over any of that stuff either. I like some movies that haven’t been well received and I just look at it as a person-by-person basis. But yeah, there’s definitely been times where I’ve been bummed about reception. Acting is a really weird thing because you’re expressing yourself and that’s the thing that matters, but also it’s for other people. No matter what you tell yourself, you want it to work for people and you want to do right by people’s time. You want people to enjoy themselves. So it sucks when you work really hard on something and it doesn’t work, but that’s just how it is.
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Do you plan to keep making music as well, or will you focus on acting and directing?
I have nothing on the books officially for acting. I definitely want to pursue and keep on acting but only if it’s something that I’m really in love with. Other than that, I’m probably going to tour a little bit with my band next year and put out another album. I have some music that I’ve written over the last two years that I want to record. So I’m kind of keeping it open.
Is there anyone you would love to work with next?
I’d love to work with Jesse Eisenberg again. I feel like he really understood me as an actor. Paul Thomas Anderson, obviously. Everyone in the world wants to be in a movie by him. But I mean, also, I would love to just work with friends. There’s so many people that I respect that I would love to just keep learning from.
Story by Josh Rosenberg
Photographs by Rona Liana Ahdout
Styling by Warren Alfie Baker
Coat, shirt, trousers, loafers, and socks by Thom Browne
Grooming by Ruth Hernandez
Editor in chief: Michael Sebastian
Esquire executive design director: Martin Hoops
Esquire visual director: James Morris
Esquire entertainment director: Andrea Cuttler
