Gaten Matarazzo on grief, gratitude and saying goodbye to "Stranger Things"

“I don’t think I’ll ever be in something that makes quite as much of an impact the way Stranger Things has.”

As Netflix’s Stranger Things comes to an end, Gaten Matarazzo, 23, is focused on soaking in the final moments. “I really want to take it in and enjoy it. I don’t think I’ll ever be in something that makes quite as much of an impact the way Stranger Things has.” Matarazzo plays Dustin, who we see grappling with a loss. “I wanted to see a bit of a pessimism that I think [is how] a lot of children approach their grief.” He’s grateful to have understood the scale of the sci-fi series. “I spent a good chunk of my time trying to really recognize how special it was. And to live very much in the present.” But that last day on set was surreal. “It was a good day, but it was a very weird next morning. One of the most eerily quiet, melancholy kind of mornings that any of us had ever experienced.” But Hollywood did what Hollywood does, it moves on. “It kind of hurts your feelings how quickly everything starts getting turned over. It’s like, ‘Please don’t touch anything for a while.’”

Editor’s Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for publication.

You are amid the huge final press tour of the huge, final season of Stranger Things. So my first question for you is, how do you feel right now?

It’s pretty incredible. I love getting to talk about this show. I’d do it every day in my life by choice, which is very nice. It’s a pretty unreal experience, I get to go to some of the most incredible places in the world just to talk about it, and that’s pretty amazing. I always have a blast doing it, and I really want to take it in and enjoy it as much as we can for this last go around, because I don’t think we’ll be a part of anything as exciting as far as the press goes for a long time. And I don’t think I’ll ever be in something that makes quite as much of an impact the way Stranger Things has. So it’s something to try to enjoy as much as I can for sure.

Well, you definitely should enjoy it as much as you can. But also, you’re so young that the likelihood that you’re gonna be a part of something big in the future is pretty strong. To that point, what has it been like growing up on the show?

It’s a pretty surreal way to do it, for sure. It’s definitely an unorthodox way to grow up. I am super grateful because it’s kind of given me a great head start in how approaching this career might operate, which is something that is quite rare to come along at any point, especially just being in my early 20s and having this much experience under my belt is pretty special. I love it quite a bit. It’s a little weird dealing with normal growing pains in a public platform, and a lot of people, I think, engage because it is so bizarre. And I think that’s why people ask about it a lot. People ask about what growing up is like in the public eye because it’s inherently a very interesting idea. But I think we’re lucky enough that we were in a position where we’re very protected throughout that process and we were able to kind of rise above a bit of a stereotype or a stigma that comes along with children who work in the industry in which a lot of times, historically, they’ve become famous for being exploited for a good amount of their time or their money. We had a really good support system around us. We have parents who were in it for the right reasons. We had a deep love for what we did. And child labor laws are far more in advancement than they have been in in the past, so we had a really good situation going. So now we can just jump into this as adults and not necessarily worry about our safety as much, which is very nice.

There was a moment a few years back where a video of you singing went viral. I think many were surprised by your musical theater background. What is that like to have people discover that you have this other side of you that is very different from your character on Stranger Things?

Oh man, it is very different. I think that’s why it’s so funny that they made me sing in the show. I think it’s ridiculous, and I’ll never live it down. It is something special for sure. I’ve been singing since I could talk. I’ve always loved it. I definitely think for a good chunk of my time growing up, before I started working on Stranger Things, I think a lot of musical theater kids feel this, that they would consider themselves a singer first. Because there’s not a lot of opportunity. You can sing anywhere you want to. You can sing in the shower. I started singing in the car and at church, when I went to church as a kid. So you can just do that and grow, whereas acting is a little bit harder. You have to kind of be lucky enough to have an opportunity to do it outside of an audition room. So that’s kind of what dominated most of my time when I was younger, working in things in which I was singing, because that’s something I developed at a very young age. And when I started Stranger Things, I stopped singing for a good chunk of time, not because I wanted to, but because I just didn’t really have a space to. I wasn’t working in the theater at all at the time, and my voice was changing, so I felt awkward to sing in public, and I didn’t do that. And I kind of broke the habit of continuously doing it. So when I jumped back in, around the time of season three when they made me do it [laughs] for the show.

Well, you kind of were contracted. [laughs]

Yes, of course. I was contractually obligated to sing in that show. I also started making a jump back into musical theater, and that was very daunting. It was not a seamless transition. It very much felt like an uphill battle, because I hadn’t been working on my voice like I should have, and I didn’t sing through my voice change. So, I basically had to start from scratch. So those first shows I came back and did, I was not proud of in retrospect. I really think that I felt like I was treading water out there at best. And it kind of helped me to hunker down and get back to a better state of things and work on my voice and not just coast by and be like, “Oh, actor first and I can sometimes sing a little bit,” which I think is probably a phase in which I’m at right now. But I didn’t wanna be, if I was jumping in a musical theater, I didn’t wanna ride the coattails, I guess, of my work in Stranger Things and just hope for the best, like hope that people don’t just giggle at me a little. Because at some of those stages there’s a lot of pressure, some of the best voices in the world, and to stand up there and at least try to hold your own is not an easy task. So, it became a big focus of my career in the last like four or five years.

Speaking of this last season, where do we find Dustin this season, and what can we expect that you can share? Because I know that contract is tight.

Yeah, pretty tight-lipped. They’ve showed enough that I can feel comfortable explaining his early arc in the trailer. They showed enough, I’m like, “Okay, I feel like I’m okay diving in a tad.” He’s not in his usual, he’s in a pretty rough spot at the beginning of it, and I think he has been from the end of season four into the beginning of season five. Whatever that time frame is, I think that’s relatively vague, or they might specify it, I’m just forgetting, which is also very possible. But he’s dealing with an intense loss of a friend [and] he’s not necessarily equipped with the tools to do so helpfully. And that’s a lot of times how kids deal with grief. It’s how anybody deals with grief. I think everybody resorts back to their instincts and doesn’t really have very good decision-making ability when dealing with something like that. And he, I think, is bringing to life a bit of an aesthetic from his friend who he lost to try to keep him there, which is, I think, sweet and endearing. He also is easily irratable and pissy, and I think kind of dejected, which I think is a fun—not fun—but as an actor, I wanted the grief to feel nuanced when approaching it in the show, especially because there’s a whole lot of time to go over it. It’s an ensemble show. Everybody has a lot to contribute. There’s only so much time you get to establish how somebody grieves in a very quick amount of time before the ball gets rolling. And I didn’t want it to just be stopping in melodrama. I kind of wanted to see a bit of a pessimism that I think a lot of children approach their grief [with]. I think there’s a lot more to be said there than just being sad all the time. At least from what I experienced when I was about a similar age when I experienced a loss like that was just how consistently put off you feel or just not even angry, you just feel pissy all the time. And it’s not fun, and it’s something he’s experiencing himself.

There is something really special about watching you grow up, literally, as an actor. See how you’ve changed. I don’t know if you’d be able to do some of the emotional things the way you did them in season one.

I don’t know, kids have a way of being truthful in times where it wouldn’t be expected. They kind of have a way of not really thinking about whether or not what they’re doing is accurate. They just feel and let it explode out there, and that’s why sometimes it’s just like, “oh sh**.”

But do you feel like you’ve grown as an actor? How has Stranger Things changed you as an actor?

I say this a bunch, it’ll be easier to find ways that it hasn’t impacted me than ways that it has. I think it’s shaped me completely for the most part. It’s given me an opportunity to work on what I do consistently throughout my teenage years, which is a very hard time to work as an actor, to pursue a career in it because when you are 14, 15, they will usually just have 18-year-old play that age. Eighteen and look young to play those parts just so they don’t have to deal with child labor laws, they don’t have to deal with the schooling on set, they don’t have to deal with child guardians and time cap limits on how many work hours you can do when you’re under the age of 18, which are very valuable rules that made it possible for us to do it and do it safely. So I highly recommend those for children working, because it’s a very odd thing to suggest, because it is children in a workplace, but I digress. It’s rare to find anything that gives you the option to practice that much. And that’s what’s kind of scary, you see those earlier seasons, they feel a little bit like practice runs to me. I look back, I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know if I would do it the same way again.” But also, you cut yourself slack because you look back and you’re like, “I was 13. That’s okay. That’s what this is for.” And I feel like I’ve been able to take a lot of tools that I’ve been gifted over the course of time there to go and try something new and try to grow elsewhere outside of the show throughout this process, too, so that’s been fun. I don’t think I’ll be able to reflect fully on how it shaped me as an actor until I start working on stuff afterwards. I’m wondering how hard it will be to consistently let go of this character in the work that I do, because half the time I do new projects, I’m sure people will say the same thing when they see some new ones that I’ve done where I look back and I’m like, “Okay, that’s very much a Dustinism, and I should have been a lot more mindful about trying to find a disconnect there.” But that’ll come with time.

What was that last day of shooting like?

It was a good day. It was really, it was a busy one for sure. Everybody who had ever worked on that set seemingly was in the studio that day. And anybody who was on the cast during that season who wasn’t even filming that day was all there. So it’s kind of like everybody was there no matter what was gonna be happening because it was the last [day]. Nobody was gonna miss that no matter if they had wrapped or had either not been working or had finished their stuff at another time. It certainly didn’t feel like a regular day of working on the show. There was like this tarp that held this big bunch of balloons, a huge tarp up over top of the studio that held seemingly hundreds of balloons and confetti that we knew inevitably was going to get released and dropped over the studio and there’d be a toast and many speeches and many toasts and all that. There was lots of tears and lots of laughs always. It was a good day, but it was a very weird next morning. And we’d been recently asked about what that next day felt like. And that was one of the most eerily quiet, melancholy kind of mornings that any of us had ever experienced. It’s just like the noise, and it’s really quick how that turnaround works. Like you finish that day and it kind of hurts your feelings how quickly everything starts getting turned over. How quickly they start breaking things down. How quickly the trucks leave the lot. How quickly it’s like, “All right, time to go.” There’s kind of a sacred period where it’s like, please don’t touch anything for a while, but it’s a studio where a lot of things film and they have to move on and they have to get going, which they did. And that was a weird thing to watch.

That’s so Hollywood. Crying one day and then everything’s gone.

It really is. Sometimes it’s so frustrating to me. That’s one of my least favorite aspects of it, is that you get so close with the people that you’re working with. Stranger Things is a different thing here because there’s no world where I’m not friends with these guys for the rest of my life. It’s just been too much time invested in our relationships with each other for that to be the case. But you work on a movie for a month and you get along really well with the cast, then bye-bye. You spend the evenings and stuff going out to dinner or being at each other’s places and hanging out and getting to know each other really well and it’s like, “Oh my God, this is great, I can’t wait to keep hanging out.” And then it wraps and you all fly to wherever you live and everybody lives in different cities and I don’t see them again for months, if not a year and that’s so frustrating because I do love how easy it feels to make friends doing this, but how easy it is to lose touch with them as well. That’s weird.

What is something that you look forward to moving on from this moment?

That’s a good question. I haven’t really thought about it yet. I think I’ve been lucky enough not to need to. I’ve really been lucky just to be able to enjoy this past decade. I think this answer will change greatly, I’m sure in the next few months. But I don’t think there was much that I really took for granted. I think that I spent a good chunk of my time trying to really recognize how special it was. And to live very much in the present and not to be like, “Oh man, but what about after?” Because you really don’t know. And the way that this business works is that, like we’re on a press tour now, the algorithms are forcing our faces onto everybody’s phones, which I’m publicly saying, I’m sorry to everybody who wants to chuck their phone at the sight of my face. I appreciate you sticking around. You don’t have to, I promise. It won’t hurt my feelings. Three months from now, after the show releases, who knows? It will have moved on and settled, and I notice that when I go out and about—I live in New York City, so it’s a lot of people—and I’ll walk around a ton during this whole process right now during the press tour, and it’s kind of hard to at the moment because it gets a little bit busy and people line up and kind of recognize and ask for pictures and such, which I’m always happy to do. I mean, it’s not very often that people are recognized for their work to a level where people want to stop and talk to them about it. So that’s very special and I really appreciate it. But then I’m telling you like months from now, I’ll be able to go and walk through Times Square and it won’t happen, which I love, [and] that’s kind of how the ebb and flow really works, and I personally love that because then you just get to let it go and then just fully do what you want. And that’s something I haven’t quite figured out yet. I would love to do more theater. Like you said, there’s always acting and whatnot, but outside of it, what’s next? I’ve never really considered anything outside of that. It’s been my life and my priority since I was 9 years old. And maybe it’s time to. The thing about it is that you can jump in and work on new projects consistently and have months of buffer time between things and have it look like you haven’t stopped working at all, depending on how things get released or what it is you decide to work on. But maybe it is one of those times where I spend a few months exploring a new chunk of myself or maybe experiencing something that I haven’t been able to that’s quite normal for someone my age. Like maybe that looks like school or approaching a new project, something like that. Like I said again, I’m very fortunate to be able to not know and look optimistically, rather than full of anxiety because that’s usually how new life phases feel and it’s always a very anxious process, but I’m in a very lucky position.

I think you should go on spring break. Go on a crazy spring break trip. You didn’t get to experience that.

Drive down to Fort Lauderdale?

Go crazy, get crazy with senior citizens. I think that’s wonderful.

I have a lot more in common with them than people may think. We have good conversations.

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