Gaten Matarazzo is giving fans a peek into the off-screen friendships that have grown alongside Stranger Things.
Speaking about his castmates, the actor revealed that there are two co-stars he messages the most. “I’m texting Finny and Caleb a ton all the time,” he said, referring to Finn Wolfhard and Caleb McLaughlin. “They update a lot. They like a good meme and a good laugh. A good voice memo, too. We do a number of those on a frequent basis.”
Matarazzo, who has been part of the Netflix phenomenon since its debut in 2015, also reflected on living with Wolfhard while shooting the show’s fifth and final season. On Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s on Me podcast, he described their roommate era as “kind of like a college experience.”
But that also meant embracing the mess. Three months into living together, he recalled thinking, “This place is disgusting. What are we doing?’” When asked who was the bigger slob, he admitted, “We kind of match each other's energy a little bit.” After so many years of friendship, he said neither held the other to any housekeeping standards. “We were kind of like, ‘Ah, f--- it. Whatever, man. We’ll get to it later.’”
The actor also looked back on the final season’s table read. “That was December 2023… and it was unreal. Everyone was so excited about it,” he said. Because the scripts were handed out gradually, “we only read the first maybe three or four at one time, and then we trickled in the other ones later on.”
The long-running sci-fi series released its final season on November 26 on Netflix, with volume 2 scheduled for December 25 and the finale set to premiere on New Year's eve.
