Finn Wolfhard recalls real robbery interrupting his fake robbery

Does art imitate life, or life imitate art? Either way, ideally you don’t want life to imitate art when the art is alarming or violent or dangerous. Unfortunately, that’s just what happened to Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard when he was shooting his directorial debut, the short film Night Shifts. The young star shared the story of the real armed robbery that interrupted his fake armed robbery on a new episode of Hot Ones.

“The short is about a robbery that happens between a clerk and a robber, and they end up being old friends from high school. And in real life, while we were shooting the robbery scene a guy came in with a fake—he welded a fake gun together through like, bike springs? It was the weirdest thing ever,” Wolfhard explained. “And he came in just kind of brandishing this fake gun and Artoun, the guy who was playing the burglar, turned around with his fake gun and they were just pointing fake guns at each other like a standoff.”

The actor recalled, “I was sitting there directing and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ and I kind of peaked out and saw this standoff going on, and I was like ‘What—what is happening?!’ And the guy left.” All’s well that ends well, right? “Because I was so into [the shoot], I was like ‘Cool, let’s move on,’ and everyone was like ‘No! What the fuck just happened!’ I was like ‘No, it’s fine, let’s keep going.’” Wolfhard added. “Yeah, it was nuts.”

Wolfhard, who was inspired to get into acting by seeing all the sets around his hometown of Vancouver (“I remember Twilight would come to Vancouver every year because they would film a new movie and I remember them shooting by my house”), elsewhere recalled his early days of child stardom. “I don’t watch the early Stranger Things stuff really often but I’ve seen little clips and stuff, and I’m like, man, I didn’t know what I was doing back then, and in a lot of ways I think that really helped me,” he said. “And now as you get older you get so much more kind of self-obsessed, and you get a little more in your head. And I feel like I learned so much more, obviously, since then, but I wish I had a little bit of that naivete.”