Gaten Matarazzo Trades Stranger Things for Rent and the Stage That Raised Him

Gaten Matarazzo

Photo: German Comic Con / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 8, 2002 New London, Connecticut, United States
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Angry Birds Movie 2, Honor Society, My Father's Dragon
Awards	SAG Award (shared)

In London this autumn, Gaten Matarazzo spends his evenings as Mark Cohen, the would-be filmmaker in Rent who points a camera at his friends because filming them is easier than saying what he feels. Mark stands at the centre of the stage and a half-step outside the story. For a decade Matarazzo has occupied a similar spot in the public mind: one of the children whose faces sold Stranger Things to the world, and the one the show most often handed the jokes. Now that Hawkins is closed, he has passed on the obvious screen follow-up and taken the kind of job he was doing before Netflix ever called.

That earlier life is the part people forget. Matarazzo was a working Broadway actor before he was a television one, and the gap between the two versions of him explains most of the choices he is making now. The kid audiences met on a bicycle in Indiana had already spent years in rehearsal rooms, learning to hit a mark eight times a week.

He was born Gaetano John Matarazzo III in New London, Connecticut, on September 8, 2002, and grew up in Little Egg Harbor Township, on the New Jersey shore, in a family whose roots run back to Avellino. He trained as a singer at the Starlight Performing Arts Center in New Jersey and was still a child when he joined the Broadway company of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert as a replacement, playing the son of the lead. He went on to play Gavroche in the US tour of Les Misérables and then in the 2014 Broadway revival. His first screen credit was a single episode of The Blacklist.

He was also born with cleidocranial dysplasia, a rare genetic condition that affects the growth of the collarbones, skull and teeth. When Matt and Ross Duffer cast him in Stranger Things, after he had auditioned for the role of Mike Wheeler, they rewrote Dustin Henderson to share the condition, and the bullying Dustin faces in the first season grew out of those conversations. Matarazzo has used the visibility ever since to raise money for CCD Smiles, a charity that helps cover the oral surgeries people with the condition often need.

Stranger Things arrived in 2016 and became one of the defining series of the streaming era. Dustin, lisping and endlessly scheming, gave the show much of its warmth; his odd-couple friendship with Joe Keery’s Steve Harrington turned into one of its most reliable pleasures in later seasons. The cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by an ensemble in a drama series in 2017, and Matarazzo finished high school at Pinelands Regional in 2020, with the show still running.

Between seasons he kept his hand in on stage, and that is where his best reviews came from. In 2022 he joined the final Broadway cast of Dear Evan Hansen as Jared Kleinman. A year later Thomas Kail cast him as Tobias Ragg in the Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, opposite Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford. He was on stage for roughly 25 minutes of a three-hour show and walked away with some of its warmest notices: critics singled out his account of “Not While I’m Around” and a Tobias played with plain sweetness rather than the slow-wittedness the part often gets.

The screen record outside Hawkins is thinner, and less flattering. Prank Encounters, the Netflix hidden-camera series he hosted and executive produced from 2019, landed at 40 percent on Rotten Tomatoes; reviewers called it Punk’d arriving fifteen years late and openly doubted that its scares were real. Much of the rest has been voice work that keeps his face off screen: Bubba in The Angry Birds Movie 2, Boris in Cartoon Saloon’s My Father’s Dragon, Sig Greebling in LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy. His live-action turn opposite Angourie Rice in Honor Society, on Paramount+, came and went quietly. Even the final season of Stranger Things brought friction: part of the audience called Dustin annoying as he raged through his grief for Eddie Munson, and Matarazzo defended the arc as an honest picture of a teenager who has lost a friend. Ten years in, the screen industry has still not shown what it wants from him beyond Dustin; the stage has.

The goodbye to Dustin took a long time. The fifth season wrapped in December 2024 after an eleven-month shoot, and the last episodes reached Netflix at the end of 2025. In the finale Dustin gives the graduation speech his late friend once daydreamed about, and Matarazzo told Deadline that the main thing he felt, once he was finally allowed to talk about it, was relief.

The year since has been the busiest of his adult career. Pizza Movie, a stoner comedy written and directed by Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, premiered at SXSW in March 2026 and reached Hulu on April 3; Matarazzo plays Jack, one of two college roommates whose trip downstairs for a pizza turns surreal after an experimental drug, opposite Sean Giambrone, and he also served as an executive producer. Reviews were mostly warm, with critics crediting the chemistry between the two leads. A month later Angel released Andy Serkis‘s animated Animal Farm in US cinemas, with Matarazzo voicing the young piglet Lucky alongside Seth Rogen, Kieran Culkin and Glenn Close.

He then went back to musicals on two fronts. Lin-Manuel Miranda cast him as Toby in Octet, his screen adaptation of Dave Malloy’s chamber musical about eight people who lock their phones in a box in a church basement, with Amanda Seyfried, Rachel Zegler, Phillipa Soo and Jonathan Groff in the ensemble; the 22-day shoot in Yonkers wrapped in June 2026, and no release date has been set. Then came London. Luke Sheppard’s revival of Rent, built on his 2020 production at Manchester’s Hope Mill Theatre, began previews at the Duke of York’s Theatre, soon to be renamed the Tom Stoppard Theatre, on September 26, 2026, with Matarazzo making his West End debut as Mark.

Opening night is October 8, and the run has already been extended to March 27, 2027. Mark spends most of Rent filming his friends instead of living alongside them, until the final act forces him to choose. Matarazzo, who spent his childhood on a stage and his adolescence on a screen, is taking the role at the moment he gets to choose for himself, with Octet still waiting for a date.

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Tags: actors, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Stranger Things, Gaten Matarazzo, Sweeney Todd, Joe Keery

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