Playing out the big twist at the end of Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1 left Noah Schnapp literally bruised and bloody, the actor shared in detail on Wednesday’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
Spoilers for Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1 follow.
Fallon introduced Schnapp with much fanfare, fancying himself a Stranger Things superfan. Once the host finished geeking out over the big twist involving the character of Will Byers, Schnapp got to detailing his own oversized, initial reaction to that script.
“I remember people texting me before that script dropped, like, ‘Noah, you have to read the scripts,’ and I was like, ‘It’s fine. I’ll read it at the table read,'” the actor recalled. “And then more people started texting me, and I was like, ‘Okay, maybe I should read this before.’
“I’m in the shower, it’s right before we leave [for the table read], and I’m like, ‘I’m gonna read it. I need to see what they’re talking about,'” Schnapp continued. “And so I skim, skim, skim…. I get to the end of [Episode] Four and that big reveal… and I was like, ‘Oh, my god!’
“I was living with my assistant, Brooke, at the time, and I burst out of the shower, half-naked — ‘Brooke, Brooke, read that last page!'” he recalled. “And [as she read the scene] she was like, ‘A trail of blood…. You have powers!'”
Acting out Will’s heretofore-unknown connection to Vecna and his army of Demogorgons also had an effect on Schnapp. A physical effect.
As Fallon pulled out a close-up BTS photo of Schapp’s bruised face, the Stranger Things star explained, “I was screaming so much that day” — when Will felt a Demogorgon being enguled by a flamethrower — “that I actually popped all the blood vessels in my face.
“This has never happened before,” he noted. “I was like, ‘I think I’m going too far.”
All for a moment that lasted, Schnapp joked, “three seconds” on-screen. “They had me there [on-set, screaming] for like two hours,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Guys, you couldn’t have extended it a little bit?'”
Luckily, filming the reveal of Will’s powers, leading to an instantly iconic nosebleed, took a much shorter amount of time — as in a singular take.
Heading into that scene, “I was like, ‘Okay, this is the volume finale, we have to perfect this, let’s get comfortable, this is gonna [require] Take 100…,'” Schnapp shares. “We do one take, and I rush into the tent to watch it with [series co-creator] Ross [Duffer], and we both look at each other like, ‘Don’t touch it!!!’ It was our first one-take wonder.”
