The final season of Netflix’s blockbuster show “Stranger Things” is kicking off today, well over nine years after the show premiered on the streaming platform.
And as Salon reports, producers had to resort to some visual trickery to wind back the clock for the show’s rapidly aging cast. In a new five-minute preview of the upcoming season, actor Noah Schnapp’s character, Will Byers, had to be digitally de-aged to retell the story of what happened when Will became trapped in the Upside Down, a shadowy parallel universe, in the show’s first season — but this time, from Will’s perspective.
In other words, the now 21-year-old actor had to look like his 10 or 11-year-old self. According to Deadline, young actor Luke Kotokek had to stand in for Schnapp during filming. Then, Schnapp’s digitally de-aged face was swapped with Kotokek’s in post by VFX company Lola — with some environmental assistance, since the Upside Down is blanketed in endless darkness in the show’s fictional universe.
The technique isn’t without precedent on the show. Costar Millie Bobby Brown, who plays the character Eleven, also had to undergo the same process for season four of “Stranger Things” for a similar sequence, with actor Martie Blair taking her place.
It remains to be seen whether other actors will also be de-aged if their stories are revisited through similar flashbacks during season five.
While the tech isn’t exactly new in Hollywood, it’s a startling instance of de-aging tech, especially considering we’ve seen Schnapp grow up with each passing season of “Stranger Things” over the better part of the last decade.
“Time may move strangely in the Upside Down, but the actors’ hormones do not care,” Salon wrote. “This is the fate of long-running series about kids. At some point, all such shows lose their battles with biology.”
Schnapp had to do some outside-of-the-box thinking to help Kotokek reimagine Will’s treacherous experience in the Upside Down.
“I asked [Millie] for help, honestly,” he told Deadline. “I was like, ‘How did you work with the kid when you had to do it?’ It was fun to step into those director shoes that we don’t really get the chance to do on the show.”
He had to “think introspectively and reflectively of how I act and how I did act and move and breathe and turn and look and kind of relay that onto this little kid, who was so cute.”
“It’s a little digital-looking,” he admitted. “It’s hard to make it look perfect, but it turned out pretty well.”
In many ways, fans were able to grow up with both the fictional characters and the actors portraying them, a fascinating documentation of how time has passed.
“And it’s so interesting,” Schnapps told Deadline. “Ten years ago, social media wasn’t a thing. It was not what it is like 1764301895 at all. I posted pictures of my dog, and I had like 25 followers.”
“It’s interesting, the sense of humility you really have to leave at the door,” he added.
More on de-aging: New Movie Uses AI to De-Age Tom Hanks and Robin Wright to What They Looked Like in the 90s
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