Gaten Matarazzo makes West End debut in Rent — SkimNews
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- Gaten Matarazzo makes his West End debut as Mark in Rent at the Tom Stoppard theatre in London, running 26 September to 27 March 2027
- Matarazzo first joined Broadway at age 9 in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and appeared in Les Misérables at 11, before booking Stranger Things at 13 — a CV that undercuts any "stunt casting" accusations
- Stranger Things, in which he played Dustin, stretched to five seasons and nearly 10 years due to Covid and the Hollywood writers' strikes, finally ending 1 January 2026
- Matarazzo returned to Broadway in Dear Evan Hansen (2022) and Sweeney Todd (2023), and earlier this year filmed Octet, an upcoming Lin-Manuel Miranda a cappella film about phone addiction based on Dave Malloy's play
- Matarazzo founded CCD Smiles, a nonprofit supporting people with cleidocranial dysplasia — the same condition he has and which the Stranger Things writers, the Duffer Brothers, wrote into the show
- Matarazzo drew direct parallels between Rent's themes — astronomical cost of living and a deadly pandemic with no clear fix — and 2026, while cautioning against flattening the specificity of the original HIV/Aids crisis
Why it matters: Matarazzo's West End bow arrives just months after Stranger Things wrapped its decade-long run on 1 January 2026, positioning him to pivot into a stage career that began at age 9. Rent itself, a 1996 rock opera born from Jonathan Larson's death hours before its first preview, gets a high-profile 2026 revival whose themes of housing crisis and pandemic-era uncertainty the lead is explicitly tying to the present day.
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