Noah Schnapp has revealed how his twin sister reacted when he first told her he was gay, prompting raised eyebrows among many fans.
The Stranger Things star, 18, said his sister Chloe Schnapp was the first person he came out to, before he told the rest of his family and later, the world, about his sexuality.
In a new interview with Variety, Noah recalled thinking: “I can’t tell anyone else before I tell my own twin sister – she’ll kill me.”
He added: “She was ecstatic. She said that she would’ve hated the idea of me marrying another girl and having to compete with that girl for attention.
“The fact that now it’ll be a guy, she was like, ‘Oh, he’ll be my best friend’.”
In a response to a tweet from Variety about the moment, fans have suggested Chloe’s concern about having to compete with another woman for attention was “creepy”.
Many referred to the late Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis who was known for his theories about sexual relations and family dynamics.
“RIP Sigmund Freud you would have loved Noah Schnapp revealing his twin sister’s reaction to him coming out,” one person wrote on Twitter.
Another said: “Oh Sigmund Freud would have had a field day with this.”
Some people opined that Noah should not have told the publication what Chloe said.
“His sister was crazy for saying it but he’s crazier for telling Variety. Like nobody needed to know this,” one person commented.
“Truly some stranger things going on,” another fan quipped.
However, some people came to Chloe’s defence and criticised others for immediately over-sexualising the teenage siblings.
“People acting like this is such a bizarre thing to say… she’s just a teenage girl afraid of losing her brother to someone else,” one person said, adding that it might have been “silly and embarrassing” for Chloe but people should not be judgemental.
Another said: “The comments so serious when clearly this was light-hearted banter between siblings… [Be for f***ing real].”
In his interview, Schnapp also spoke about how his mother reacted when he came out to her. He said that, while he had told his sister, he “slid back into the closet” after returning to college, but became “miserable”.
His mother, Karinne Schnapp, became worried for his wellbeing and visited him in college: “I couldn’t tell her how I was feeling without telling her what the problem was, so just one night at dinner, I was like, ‘This is it’,” Noah explained.
“She was like, ‘Finally, you told me!’ She said that she would talk to her friend when I was 12 and be like, ‘I know my son is gay. Do I have to ask him? How do I do it?’ The friend was like, ‘Oh, you just let him be and let him figure it out himself’.”
Noah added that he felt like he had taken “the biggest breath of relief of my life” after telling his mother. “Just to know what I finally got it off my chest and she knew it was like, ‘ugh!’,” he said. He later came out to his father and his friends.
In January, he posted a TikTok video in which he came out to the world. He shared a clip of himself lip-syncing to the words: “You know what it never was? That serious? It was never that serious.”
In text over the clip, he wrote: “When I finally told my friends and family I was gay after being scared in the closet for 18 years and all they said was ‘we know’.”
He attended his first-ever Pride celebration in New York this year after coming out. To mark the occasion, Noah shared a series of photos on Instagram, which showed him wearing a vest that read “Straight Outta The Closet” in rainbow colours and dancing in the street with other LGBT+ revellers.
