Rent is a study in both joy and despair. The 90s rock opera spawned the kinds of irrepressible musical numbers – Seasons of Love, Take Me Or Leave Me – that would become Broadway standards, mastered and massacred in choir auditions and high schools across the world. Jonathan Larson’s self-described attempt “to bring musical theatre to the MTV generation” is also a capitalist critique: a drama about a bohemian coterie of penniless creatives sticking it to the man, all while their circle is ravaged by HIV and Aids. It still feels highly relevant today; see: What You Own – sample lyric “And when you’re living in America / At the end of the millennium / You’re what you own”.
Gaten Matarazzo says “that song may arguably be more impactful now than in 1996, considering what we know about what American media and world media would become, and our access to constant mind-numbing noise …” This autumn, he makes his West End debut as Mark, the struggling film-maker who chronicles the lives of his friends in New York’s East Village, and serves as the show’s de facto narrator.
It’s something of a musical theatre-themed year for the 24-year-old, best known for playing lovable super-geek Dustin in Netflix’s Spielbergian smash Stranger Things. Earlier this year, he filmed Octet, an upcoming Lin-Manuel Miranda a cappella film about phone addiction, based on a play by Dave Malloy. Of course, when a TV star makes the transition to musical theatre – or just theatre full stop – there are often accusations of stunt casting. “I understand that the work I’ve done leading up to this has influenced my ability to do these fun things,” says Matarazzo. “I will acknowledge fully that that probably has played a big role.”
Except that, well, if anyone is getting stunt-casting accusations it probably shouldn’t be him. After years of auditions, Matarazzo made his Broadway debut aged just nine, in the antipodean jukebox musical Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. A dive into the depths of Google unearths a video of him – in Les Misérables, aged 11 – giving a tour of the theatre to camera (“We use a lot of fog in the show,” he explains). He cringes a little at the mention. “I hate watching those,” he laughs. He left Les Mis in March 2015 and booked Stranger Things in June of the same year. (“Bananas!” he says.) But before the show had finished airing, he had already found his way back to the stage, appearing in Dear Evan Hansen and Sweeney Todd on Broadway in 2022 and 2023 respectively. It was around this time that many of his TV fans discovered his background in musicals (one YouTube comment reads: “The day I found out he could sing was a beautiful day indeed”).
We meet at a fancy bar in central London, close to where the Rent rehearsals are taking place, Matarazzo arriving with a heavy-looking rucksack slung over his shoulder and a smattering of brown curls poking up messily from under a baseball cap. Stranger Things may have finally ended on 1 January 2026, but it still looms large over his professional and personal life. The show that was “expected to probably only be one season” went on for five, with Covid and the Hollywood writers’ strikes stretching its run to almost 10 years.
Matarazzo tries a couple of metaphors – catapults, snowballs – before settling on one to describe the feeling of going from being an average kid to a TV star. It was, he says, “a train you can’t really jump off. Not that we really would have wanted to, but it would become stressful every now and again.”
Up until that point, his life – blossoming Broadway career aside – had indeed been quite normal. Raised in Little Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey (population: 22,000), Matarazzo and his two siblings always sang at home, though he’s keen to point out that his sister Sabrina was “the real singer in the camp”. His parents worked “nights, and several jobs” to support his ambitions, before his mum was laid off and decided to pivot to being her son’s chaperone. Then at13 came the chance to join a new Netflix series, originally scheduled to film in Long Island but later relocated to Atlanta. He decides not to give too many details about where he lived, “because I’ll probably go back a ton – a lot of us lived in one neighbourhood because we loved it so much”.
You get the sense with Matarazzo that it’s especially important for him to have some boundaries. In the early days of the show, he says he carefully tracked how many followers he was amassing, and how many likes his posts attracted. “And I was too damn young to be doing that.” He says he was encouraged to have a public account, to reply to DMs from fans and to post videos. “It wasn’t like there were people in the wings orchestrating some malicious idea,” he explains. “But I think in retrospect, it would have been very reasonable to say: ‘Maybe it’s not OK for [users of] big public spacesto know intimate details about the lives of children?’”
While he’s keen to stress that “nothing really bad happened”, understandably he has qualms about young stars growing up in the glare of 24/7 publicity. Earlier this year a news story resurfaced about a fortysomething woman who told Matarazzo that she had had a crush on him since he was 13.While some interpreted it as #MeToo-adjacent, Matarazzo thinks that it “wasn’t as malicious as it may have been presented as afterwards. It wasn’t very scary, more just inappropriate and icky.”
Matarazzo, who describes his interactions with most fans as “the greatest pleasure and honour in the world”, has an understated nice-guy aura about him. We segue to the nonprofit he founded, CCD Smiles, which supports people who have the same condition as him, cleidocranial dysplasia, which affects the growth of teeth and bones (although he describes himself as having a “mild case” he has undergone multiple surgeries, while the Stranger Things writers, the Duffer Brothers, wrote his condition into the show). Does he find that he’s a role model to people he meets with CCD? “I look up to them probably more than they look up to me,” he says. “I guess I can’t generalise, but I’ve met several hundred people now with the condition, and they are some of the most positive people I’ve ever met, and a lot of them are dealing with a lot more physical issues than I am.” Creating a community has been, he says, “really damn cool … I’m really honoured to do it.” Matarazzo grew up with a family who “encouraged me to brag about [my condition]. Others were raised in families who either felt pretty indifferent or negatively about it. That breaks my heart.”
Much like Mark in Rent – who hails from upstate New York – Matarazzo is a transplant to NYC. He remembers watching the pro-shot (that is, the professionally filmed version) of Rent on Broadway as a child, “and being like, ‘Oh, this is the real fucking deal!’” Growing up, he says people told him that “you should do Mark one day. And as a theatre kid, any time somebody tells you you’d be really good at a part it becomes your life’s obsession.”
The mix of tragedy and elation that powers Rent is also somewhat central to its DNA. Jonathan Larson died from an aortic dissection of the heart just hours before the first off-Broadway previews; it was, says Matarazzo, “the most horrifyingly bad luck in the world”. He thinks part of Rent’s charm may stem from this genesis, though, and the feeling that Larson wasn’t totally finished with his creation. “What I think is so brilliant about this show – and I mean this as a compliment – is that it feels incomplete and unpolished. All of these characters are perfect representations of people who are imperfect, and struggling.”
How does he think it will resonate not only with a West End audience, but a 2026 one? “I mean, it’s a show about people living in a city where the cost of living is astronomical and unfathomable, as well as living through a pandemic that is killing people very rapidly, and no one knows how to fix it or what the proper steps are moving forward.” He doesn’t want to negate the specificity of HIV/Aids, though. “I think we can forget how truly terrifying and up in the air the idea of that diagnosis was. At the time, there really was no possibility of knowing whether you’re going to live another 20 years or 20 months.”
TV may well come calling again soon but – for now – Matarazzo seems more than comfortable with his return to the stage. Some lucky audience members will be up there with him, too, thanks to some onstage seating; he’s excited about people seeing the show “without a hint of a barrier. I think that’s just how Rent was supposed to be experienced.” Not stunt casting, then, but certainly in your face.
Rent is at the Tom Stoppard theatre, London, 26 September to 27 March 2027.
