Gaten Matarazzo
Gaten Matarazzo is an actor, born 2002.
Two Broadway musicals came first. Gaten Matarazzo played Benjamin in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and then Gavroche in Les Miserables, a part that asks a child to be funny, cocky and brave in a very short window, which is not a bad description of the register he has worked in ever since.
Dustin Henderson made him famous. Stranger Things ran from 2016 to 2025, and Dustin is the group's talker, the one whose job in almost every scene is to explain the impossible thing at speed and make you believe he believes it. Matarazzo holds a Screen Actors Guild award for ensemble work in a drama series, which is the honest shape of his talent: he is very good inside a group, and the group is better with him in it.
Outside the show he has chased comedy and animation rather than prestige. He hosted the prank series Prank Encounters for Netflix, co starred in the teen comedy Honor Society, voiced Boris in My Father's Dragon and Lucky in an animated Animal Farm, and starred in and executive produced the stoner comedy Pizza Movie. Born in New London, Connecticut in 2002, he has spent his entire working life on camera and seems in no hurry to be taken seriously.
Movies (8)
TV (8)
Where to start with Gaten Matarazzo
Stranger Things is unavoidable and genuinely the best of it, but the useful instruction is to watch the second season rather than the first if you want to see why he broke out. The show hands Dustin a plot of his own and he runs off with it.
For something else entirely, Honor Society is a smarter teen comedy than its poster suggests, and he plays Michael with a sweetness that stops the whole thing curdling.
The voice work is where the rest of him lives. My Father's Dragon is the best looking of them by some distance, The Angry Birds Movie 2 is loud and disposable, and LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy is far funnier than a licensed special has any business being. Pizza Movie is the one to watch for where he goes next.