Noah Schnapp says producers of Netflix’s Stranger Things asked him to speak in a higher pitch after hitting puberty

Noah Schnapp claims that producers asked him to speak in a higher pitch after hitting puberty to stay true to his character.

The 17-year-old star of Netflix‘s Stranger Things, explained that while filming the earlier seasons of the show puberty caused him to look and sound older than his character.

Schnapp was just 10 years old when he began playing Will Byers in 2016.

He claims producers were unhappy with how fast the actors had begun rapidly ageing past their characters in the show.

The producers and directors of the show reportedly tried their hardest to ensure the Stranger Things actors remained looking the age that their characters were supposed to be.

“It was the peak time of change, and puberty and growing up and just everything was changing with all of us, and the directors were just not loving it,” Schnapp told Flaunt.

When recounting the earlier seasons of the show, Schnapp said: “And I remember one of the producers coming up to me and telling me, ‘Noah, is there any way you could just speak in a higher tone and just slouch a little bit? Like, we need you to keep that season one innocence that you had.’

“That was like, ‘I don’t know what to tell you. My voice is dropping. I don’t sound young anymore.’”

In more recent episodes of the series, the age difference between actors and their characters has been even more noticeable.

With filming put on hold due to the Covid pandemic, the latest series of the show was released later than initially planned.

Noah Schnapp is one of the only few of Stranger Things actors who is closer to his character’s age.

Schanpp is currently 17 years old and his character Will Byers is meant to be 15 years old.

Milly Bobby Brown, who plays the show’s lead character Eleven, is 18 years old compared to her character supposedly being 14/15 years old.

The other young actors in the show are all years older than their characters, including Sadie Sink, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin who are aged 20-21.

In a recent interview, Millie and Noah were both shocked to find out their characters’ true ages, assuming that they were similar ages.

In a clip that went viral on TikTok, Millie and Noah both shocked said: “Eleven is 14?” as they found out the characters’ age.

When filming for Stranger Things 5 begins, there is chance that the final instalment of the sci-fi show will feature a time jump.

The Duffer brothers told TVLine in June: “I’m sure we will do a time jump.”

They added: “Ideally, we’d have shot [Seasons 4 and 5] back to back, but there was just no feasible way to do that.”