Finn Wolfhard has said he “had to bury” his anxiety and panic attacks while filming Stranger Things.
The actor, who has played Mike Wheeler in the hit Netflix series since 2016, recently opened up about his “crazy whirlwind career” in a new interview with GQ.
Wolfhard said that as a teenager working in the show, he “did not talk about anything” in terms of his mental health because “there was no time, or at least we didn’t feel [like there was] at the time.”
He went on to reveal he started having panic attacks at the age of 15.
“Everyone was like, ‘Look at him, he’s fine. He’s having the best time,’” Wolfhard said. “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 realise that I had to bury because of how I had to feel at work.”
He went on to say that he had a panic attack while filming his latest film, Jesse Eisenberg’s feature debut When You Finish Saving The World.
“I was so uptight and nervous about it because I just was like, ‘This is the first movie [that I’m doing] as an adult,’” Wolfhard said.
Elsewhere in the interview, the Stranger Things actor opened up about texting his co-star Winona Ryder about the rockstars she had dated.
Wolfhard said Ryder was “one of the funniest texters ever, because she’ll text you and then you’ll text her back and then she won’t text you ever again.”
He continued: “She dated Dave Grohl and MCA from Beastie Boys, and all these people. I could literally ask her what it was like knowing Kurt Cobain, and she just tells me everything.”