Finn Wolfhard is an Old Soul: “Stranger Things” Star on New Songs & Next Steps

Calum Marsh August 26, 2025

Finn Wolfhard knows you want to ask about Stranger Things. The prolific young multi-hyphenate has plenty else to talk about. There’s his debut album as a singer-songwriter, the springy, distortion-laden power-pop record Happy Birthday, which was released this past June. There’s his solo tour, which kicked off in Chicago in early September and will bring him across North America and much of continental Europe. And there’s his feature film Hell of a Summer, the comic slasher he co-wrote and co-directed with friend Billy Bryk, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023 and opened theatrically in the U.S. in April.

But Wolfhard is still principally known as Mike Wheeler, the wavy-haired, endearingly dorky kid at the heart of Stranger Things, whom Wolfhard has played — perhaps embodied — for almost a decade now. The ’80s-set sci-fi blockbuster on Netflix launched his career from total unknown child actor to one of the most famous and best-loved stars on television. So even as the show’s fifth and final season airs this November and December, Wolfhard knows that he will never be able to put the character entirely behind him. To many people, Wolfhard will always be little Mike Wheeler. He’s accepted that.

“As proud as I am of the show, I don’t want to always be looked at as that kid from season one,” Wolfhard says on a recent afternoon from his home in Vancouver. “I’m also at peace with that. I know that’s always going to be part of how the public sees me. But whatever I can do to flip that, or change people’s expectations, is kind of the fun part for me.”

By his own admission, Wolfhard has done little to distance himself from the role that brought him into the limelight. Instead, he’s simply followed his interests — which, it turns out, aren’t so dissimilar from the world of Stranger Things, whose neon lights and moody synthesisers helped usher in a wave of nostalgia for the 1980s that’s influenced pop culture for years.

“Even before Stranger Things, I collected vintage video games and had a Super Nintendo as a little kid. I owned a record player. There was something so much more fun and interesting to me about playing around with physical media.”

Finn Wolfhard

And nostalgia is all over Wolfhard’s work outside the show. Hell of a Summer is a throwback horror flick inspired by ’80s classics like Sleepaway Camp and Friday the 13th . His album Happy Birthday was recorded on four-track and eight-track and is suffused with the tape hiss of old cassettes. His work is marked by the styles of a bygone era — all the more remarkable considering that he’s only 22.

“I was always obsessed with the past, with nostalgia,” Wolfhard says. “Even before Stranger Things, I collected vintage video games and had a Super Nintendo as a little kid. I owned a record player. There was something so much more fun and interesting to me about playing around with physical media.”

It’s not that he’s a Luddite. “I don’t put the internet down, because I use it every day and all the time,” he quickly clarifies. “And I’m definitely not one of those people who’s like, ‘I was born in the wrong generation.’ But older physical media kind of takes away all the chatter. There’s just something about it that feels a little more… primal. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like getting back to the basics of making something, or playing with something.”

That desire to get back to the basics is what’s drawn him to so many of these old-fashioned projects, including Stranger Things. “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I go toward period-specific things when it comes to acting or even writing,” he says. “I find it interesting to go back.”

Though the world was introduced to him in 2016 as a gawky pre-teen battling Demogorgons, Wolfhard’s screen debut came even earlier. At the age of 12, he was cast as Zoran, a scrappy desert nomad navigating the post-apocalypse on The 100, a young adult sci-fi drama on The CW. It was a bit part, on a fairly silly program, but to the young Wolfhard in Vancouver, it was an entree into a new world — the world of professional acting.

“I feel like every time there’s an end, it turns into something else. [My castmates and I] will always have a relationship with each other. And that’s the thing that matters to me.”

Finn Wolfhard

To begin with, he had a trailer. “Not a big trailer,” he points out. “But it was one of those things where it just felt insane. It seemed huge.”

Wolfhard had done some work on student films and music videos locally, but this was his first taste of real, meat-and-potatoes filmmaking, with adults clocking in like it was a regular nine-to-five. It was eye-opening. “It was the first time I’d walked onto a set that wasn’t just, like, a bunch of young, hungry indie people making something together,” he says.

“Everyone was really nice, it just felt like the adults were stressed. It was the second-to-last season of the show. It was the first job where I saw the adult side of it — the job side of it.”

For a kid who dreamed of acting, the unglorified grind of The 100 was “a wake-up call” — particularly when it dawned on him that his character’s deformed face, which had seemed so cool as a concept, would necessitate two to three hours of painstaking prosthetic and makeup work every morning. Call it a baptism by fire. “I felt like, ‘If I can get through that, I can get through anything,’” Wolfhard says. “It was definitely strengthening.”

Wolfhard landed Stranger Things after responding to an open casting call — his short, adorable audition tape went viral when it resurfaced in 2022 — and the role was a natural fit. Over the course of the past decade, the show has only gotten bigger and bigger, and Wolfhard has grown with it, literally coming of age before our eyes. The series has been such an enduring fixture of Netflix, and indeed of this entire era of streaming, that it’s hard to imagine it finally coming to an end. Which is maybe why Wolfhard hasn’t quite accepted that it will.

“I think there’s a balance between appreciating [Stranger Things], loving what it gave me, but also trying to carve a new path. I’m trying to explore something different. I’m grateful for it, but I’m also stepping away to try other things.”

Finn Wolfhard

“I still feel like it hasn’t ended,” he says. “I think partly that’s just because I haven’t seen the last episode, so it’s not technically over. But to be honest, it’s also partly the nature of the business. Hollywood has this way where the doors are always open for more weird things to happen: weird reunions, weird reboots, remakes, whatever.” Is it possible, then, that we haven’t seen the last of Hawkins and the Upside Down — that there might still be more Mike Wheeler to come? “I think there are many endings to everything,” Wolfhard says. “And then there are mini rebirths.”

What Wolfhard has come to terms with is the working side of things — that the tried and tested relationships he’s developed with the cast and crew over so many years, over so much of his life, will now have to evolve to survive. “When we ended the show, it felt like the death of that show and that version of the relationship we all had — like me and the cast being in that specific situation, living around the corner from each other, eating together every day for a year. That’s over,” he says. “But then something else starts. A new version of that relationship. Now we have to hang out outside the show. Now we have to see each other in different ways. “I feel like every time there’s an end, it turns into something else,” he adds. “We will always have a relationship with each other. And that’s the thing that matters to me.”

Any actor who spends nearly a decade on one show has to fight to be seen as something other than that character. That goes double for a child actor. Wolfhard has spent roughly half his life on Earth playing Mike Wheeler. In the wake of the series, he is well aware that he faces an uphill battle to be seen as something more.

Not that he hasn’t already been trying. “As much as I love talking about Stranger Things, I also know that it isn’t 100 percent of my life,” he says. “I do have other things going on, other things that interest me. As an actor, you’re always being perceived in specific ways, especially when you’re on a show this long. So, I think there’s a balance between appreciating the show, loving what it gave me, but also trying to carve a new path. I’m trying to explore something different. I’m grateful for it, but I’m also stepping away to try other things.”

It’s a surprisingly mature perspective on a complex and challenging situation — a healthy way to look at the problem of expectations, and how an actor known for one thing above all others will continue to be seen. Wolfhard laughs bashfully at his approach being praised as such. “I’m trying,” he says.

“My big thing growing up was I just didn’t want to feel jaded,” he says. “Because I like those people so much. So that’s definitely been a goal of mine — do not get jaded about the show.”

Shot on location at West Coast Modern’s Perry Estate by Arthur Erickson.