Childhood Fame Hit This STRANGER THINGS Actor Hard

Published: July 9, 2026

By Michaela Gordoni

Finn Wolfhard didn’t have it easy as a child actor.

“People didn’t know how to treat me, especially the teachers,” the 23-year-old said of when he returned to school the after the summer STRANGER THINGS came out. “Kids that didn’t even look at me before were paying attention to me or wanting to hang out.”

When a girl at school pulled him into a picture after he said he couldn’t take a photo with her, he realized that he had no control over his fame.

Wolfhard and his child co-stars struggled to have “public-facing jobs at such young ages, and his and Milly Bobby Brown’s first kiss was on screen.

“I just was like: ‘Oh, it’s part of the thing, part of character,’” he recalled.

Wolfhard deeply struggled with the fame. He had anxiety and panic attacks and expressed that he wished he had a therapist when the show blew up.

“It was so crazy and overnight, that there was not really any time to think about that,” he explained.

In another interview, Wolfhard added he “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.”

He felt that others did not understand. They thought him lucky to be famous so young.

“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 said.

View this post on Instagram

Despite the fame, Wolfhard thinks he is fortunate that he got to spend some of his childhood without technology.

“But now I look at Gen Alpha: even though most of them have normal school lives, all of them have Instagram, so they all kind of do have public personas in a weird way — being ‘famous’ isn’t that far out of reach because it’s normal for the younger generation to like get that kind of dopamine hit at such a young age,” he said.

Brown previously said that childhood stardom can be dangerous.

“It just puts children in a really dangerous situation. I think everybody’s a little bit too lax about the way that children are brought up in the industry. I grew up with a lot of eyes on my parents, but I feel that those were the people that protected me the most,” she said.

As more former child actors speak out about their experiences, these stars’ stories show that children need to be protected. They should play and do normal things children do — not manage adult-level careers.

Questions or comments? Please write to us here.

Add Movieguide® as preferred on Google