Finn Wolfhard Says He's Worried About STRANGER THINGS Season 5 After GAME OF THRONES Final Season Backlash
Fans are gearing up for the fifth and final season of the Netflix series Stranger Things. The show has had four strong seasons of storytelling and action, each building to this final resolution.
While the show’s creators, The Duffer Brothers, have assured viewers that the story will wrap in the way they always imagined, one star of the series has some nervous feelings about the reception of the finale.
Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike Wheeler in the show, revealed in a new interview with Time magazine that he suffered a panic attack during the production of Stranger Things season 4 given the show’s intense fandom, which at times has been “subconsciously terrifying” to handle. 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 season 4, Wolfhard’s co-stars, Caleb McLaughlin and Gaten Matarazzo “pulled him aside and reassured him that they were feeling the same pressure,” Time writes.
Whatever pressures existed for Wolfhard and the entire Stranger Things cast only intensified as they went into production on the fifth and final season. 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” creator 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.”
I have such faith in the Duffers’ ability to tell a good story, I have very little concern that they will wrap up the show with the same heart and narration that made us all love the show in its first four seasons.
Stranger Things 5 kicks off with Vol. 1 (Episodes 1-4) on November 26th, episodes 5-7 on December 25th, and the grand finale on December 31st.