Stranger Things Season 5 Breaks A Major Promise To Fans

The "Stranger Things" kids are young adults now, so making them look like children again was tricky for the show's fifth and final season. This is evident in season 5's first episode, which opens with a flashback scene chronicling Noah Schnapp's Will Byers being stuck in the Upside Down back in the day — a storyline that took place in season 1. Bringing these scenes to life required the show's creators to use digital de-aging technology, but did they give fans some misleading information about the process?

"Stranger Things" season 5's first scene took months to complete, mainly because teenage Schnapp's digitally de-aged face had to be inserted onto the body of a younger actor to recreate young Will. It looks quite awful, and it's worsened by the fact that Shawn Levy, an executive producer and director on the series, led us to believe that the de-aging effects are practical. As the episode proves, that isn't the case at all, but at least Levy insists that they didn't use AI. As he told Deadline:

"[O]ur hair and makeup and wardrobe department are pretty exceptional, using costumes and wigs and makeup. The '80s are also our friends in returning these young adult actors to their iconic Hawkins characters. So we're going to use all the tools available to us."

De-aging actors through digital wizardry is a complicated and polarizing subject among pop culture enthusiasts, and it has a tendency to look bizarre on the screen. However, Noah Schnapp was happy to return to Will's roots in "Stranger Things" season 5, and he has shared more details about how the show's creators resurrected his teenage self.

Noah Schnapp actually had fun shooting the aforementioned flashback sequence for "Stranger Things" season 5, and even got to instruct his child actor stand-in at the time. However, his account of the process makes it sound more complicated than Shawn Levy's story about using simple makeup and wigs on the actors. In an interview for a print edition of SFX, Schnapp revealed that de-aging him for "Stranger Things" season 5's first episode was a strange experience — and a long one at that. Here is what he had to say on the matter:

"[T]hey put me in a tent and had me do all these different expressions and faces, like fear, and running and all these things. It was so weird. And then the VFX team worked on it for months. I mean, there were these VFX people who told me, 'Noah, I have been working with 11-year-old you for the past six months, watching every video of you.' It's like, 'Oh, that's weird.' But then they stamped it onto that little kid, and we got this cool little flashback scene, which is fun."

The good news, though, is that fans of practical effects can still celebrate the show's final season. In fact, the creators built a state-of-the-art set to bring Hawkins, Indiana, to life in "Stranger Things" season 5, marking a major first for the show. With that in mind, we can forgive them for using digital de-aging technology to make Will look weird for a few minutes.