"I'm just a 22-year-old guy who's going through the same weird stuff that people who are in their early 20s go through, just in a different kind of way," Finn Wolfhard says.
"A different kind of way" puts it mildly. At an age when many of his former classmates will be entering the workforce as full-time adults for the first time, Wolfhard has already accumulated enough work experience to be considered a seasoned professional. He's involved in some beloved cinematic franchises, worked alongside Hollywood heavyweights like Guillermo del Toro and Julianne Moore, and, perhaps most notably, has been one of the leads in Netflix's worldwide phenomenon Stranger Things — and we're only talking about his acting career.
Like many in his generation — albeit on a very different scale — Wolfhard forgoes the idea of a linear, one-track career. Rather than subscribing to the rigidity previous generations accepted with little resistance, Wolfhard and his peers seek a type of variety that can easily be misconstrued as wayward, but should be commended for its organized chaos — or vibes, as the kids say.
"All of us are multifaceted and have multiple things going on. We shouldn't be in boxes. If you're curious about other things, I think it's really worth exploring, even if it's not technically the quote-unquote right thing to do in your career," Wolfhard explains to Exclaim! during a video interview.
"I feel like we're all told: 'If you're a young actor and you start to be famous, move to L.A., go to Hollywood, do all the big movies.' I've never been interested in doing [that] — not in a way of like, 'I'm not like all the other girls,'" Wolfhard continues, referencing some Gen Z meme culture. "I just don't care as much about trying to do things that people would expect [if] it wouldn't make me as fulfilled or happy — I mean, I still live in Canada."
Wolfhard hasn't followed the typical route of leaving his hometown of Vancouver for SoCal, but his resume does include some of those "big movies" — namely, the successful It films and the slightly less successful Jason Reitman-helmed reboot of Ghostbusters. Interspersed between those bigger-budget projects are indie releases like When You Finish Saving the World and the upcoming The Legend of Ochi, highlighting a young performer finding his feet outside of being a kid actor.
In The Legend of Ochi — hitting Canadian theatres on April 25 through Elevation Pictures — Wolfhard plays Petro, the adopted son of Willem Dafoe's Yuri, an eccentric militant father protecting his children from the Ochi, a mythical blue-faced monkey-type creature. Wolfhard filmed The Legend of Ochi in 2021, an entire high school career ago, and at the time considered the character to be a sensitive soul seeking family and purpose. He still sees those traits in Petro, but with four extra years of experience and life, he views that performance a little differently today.
"I've learned stuff as a person and an actor since [shooting the movie]. It would be interesting to retackle that character. At the time, it was more black-and-white for me," he explains. "I think I saw less nuance in some of the characters that I would play. If I were to look at that character [now], I would add in a bunch of other little things. I think he's also someone that feels very conflicted about the kind of person he is or the kind of person that he's almost forced into being by Willem Dafoe's character."
He adds, "Even though it's only been a few years, I see a difference in the way that that character is, and even the way that I portrayed it."
Wolfhard hasn't declared he wants to be great à la Timothée Chalamet's SAG Awards speech, but this thoughtful attitude toward Petro clearly reveals an actor interested in improvement, and one uninterested in resting on the internet goodwill he earned in his teenage years. But how does someone whose big break came at 12 years old maintain that motivation?
When Wolfhard spoke to Exclaim! in 2023, he described his music career — which then consisted of the garage pop duo the Aubreys following the formative projective Calpurnia — as "a breeding ground for creativity." With the imminent release of his first solo album, Happy Birthday, on June 6 through AWAL, and his NEON-backed directorial debut, Hell of a Summer, in theatres April 4, Wolfhard's side hustles have become bona fide alternative careers, and his saving grace.
"Having these other things in my life, like music or directing, has really saved my relationship with all of them, because it almost feels to me like a fail-safe," the multi-hyphenate explains. "If I'm not feeling particularly curious or interested in, let's say, acting at the time, then I can go and make a song and feel that feeling that I could get with acting, but with music — or if it's the same thing with music, then I can go and get the same thing with acting or filmmaking or writing. It's all the same train station with all different tracks."
At 22 years of age, most of us stood at the train station, confused as to which locomotive to hop onto, staring at the multitude of sprawling routes fearing that boarding one train meant missing another. Wolfhard, in the most fabulous of Gen Z fashion, challenges this notion: why not just board them all?
"It's your birthday, stop wasting precious time," Wolfhard languidly sings over Happy Birthday's synth-laden title track, articulating his have-it-all-to-stay-alive attitude.
Anyone on the other side of 35 will smirk at the idea of a 20-something wasting time, but that age group's current crop had a significant amount of time taken from them courtesy of the pandemic.
"Pretty crazy last few years, actually, when you think about it," Wolfhard casually recalls. "I graduated high school in a parking lot." He says this flatly, neither asking for pity nor looking for an awestruck response; it's just how life turned out for him and countless others. It also explains his lyrics and mindset: major milestones passed them by, impressionable years were spent removed and indoors — time is precious, so use it wisely.
Wolfhard's thoughtfulness, work ethic and ambition fly in the face of perceptions toward Gen Z — and coincidentally, this forms the impetus for Hell of a Summer, which he co-directed and co-wrote with his filmmaking partner, Billy Bryk, a Toronto-born actor who starred in Wolfhard's 2020 short film Night Shifts. Bryk and Wolfhard wanted to make a film that authentically and accurately depicted their generation, creating a campy comedy slasher following an ensemble of camp counsellors, including Jason (played by The White Lotus's Fred Hechinger), a 24-year-old counsellor who can't seem to move on from this summer job.
The duo wrote the film in 2019 — "a lot can happen in six years, especially when you're [a] teen going into young adult" — and initially, Wolfhard mostly engaged with the supporting characters, describing himself as being "more present with the teen ensemble part of the movie."
He continues, "It's been a long time since we've written that first draft, I'm now closer to [Hechinger's Jason] character in the film, where you're older and don't really know what the next chapter of your life is going to look like."
Between Hell of a Summer and Happy Birthday, themes of identity and figuring out who you want to be keep rearing their head. Thankfully, where Hell of a Summer's Jason froze in the face of change, Wolfhard has wholeheartedly embraced it as he, along with the rest of the world, formally bid Mike Wheeler and Strangers Things adieu later this year, "saying goodbye to childhood," as Wolfhard puts it.
With the conclusion of one of the most definitive Gen Z series so far, perhaps it's time we all said goodbye to our misgivings towards a much-derided generation of youngsters who are just doing the best they can with what the world offered them. For Wolfhard, that means not just taking back the voice of his generation but proving to the world that the kids are, once again, alright.