Wil Wheaton knows he was your first crush. He has thoughts about the 'hot dads' you became

Forty years ago, Wil Wheaton landed his breakout movie role, playing Gordie in Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me at age 13. The following year, he joined the Star Trek franchise as the whiz kid Wesley Crusher on The Next Generation. More recently, he admits, he has met gay fans who told him he was their first crush.

“Love is love!” he exclaims. “We say it all the fucking time. Why is that complicated? It’s not, man, c’mon!”

The straight, 54-year-old actor tells The Advocate that meeting those fans is still a thrill.

“What’s great is that I still meet hot dads today; I’m like, ‘Fucking hot dads, dude!’ I’m just like, ‘Goddamnit, I could climb up those abs!’ And they’re like, ‘You were my first crush!’ And I’m like, ‘First of all, how are you still so hot? You’re my age!’ And second of all, I’m just like, ‘That’s fucking rad. I love that,’” he says.

Why Wil Wheaton speaks up for trans people

This past June, Wheaton attended NYC Pride, and he has decorated his personal website with blue, pink, and white banners proclaiming “trans rights are human rights.” On social media, the self-described “cis het guy” sports an ever-changing collection of rainbow pins and shirts declaring “Protect Trans Kids” and other pro-LGBTQ+ messages.

The question is, why?

From Wil Wheaton Instagram @itswilwheaton www.advocate.com

“The only way I could be a more protected class of citizen in America is if I were an openly performative Christian nationalist. I’m white. I’m male. I’m upper middle class. I’m semi-famous. I have all kinds of privilege. And yet, I’ve been othered my entire life," Wheaton says.

"I was othered by my parents. I was othered by people in my neighborhood. I was othered on the set,” he adds, explaining that his Star Trek castmates were the exception.

“And when I see other people experiencing that, I cannot help myself. I have to throw myself between those people and the people who are hurting them,” he says. “I’m standing up for my younger self in ways that no one ever, ever did.”

Wheaton offers this promise to the trans community: “Sometimes people who won’t hear you will hear me, even when we’re saying the same thing. And if I can use that privilege to reach that person and make a change, that’s one less person who fucking hassles you for existing.”

Wheaton also had sharp words for the author and creator of the Harry Potter franchise, J.K. Rowling, whose views on trans people have drawn widespread criticism.

“J.K. Rowling’s a piece of shit,” says Wheaton. “She’s a hateful, disgusting, despicable human being. She gets off on the suffering of others. I don’t know what her fucking problem is. I don’t know why she can’t leave people alone. I hate her, and what I want everyone to understand is, when you watch this program, you are putting money in her pocket that she turns around and spends to hurt people.”

Wheaton adds that he thinks everyone involved in producing the new Harry Potter series “should be deeply ashamed of themselves.”

A return to acting on his own terms

Despite retiring from on-camera acting, Wheaton returned to television this summer as a version of himself from another universe in HBO’s Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, a science fiction comedy spinoff of The Big Bang Theory. The show aired its first season finale Thursday and has its own offshoot that Wheaton co-hosts with Felicia Day: a weekly video podcast about each episode. Last week, he also appeared as a guest on HBO’s DC Comics podcast and on another hosted by his Star Trek: The Next Generation “dads,” Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner.

Frakes noted “the pain” Wheaton suffered during the filming of their series. Wheaton says that experience has made returning to a set difficult.

“The part of me that’s so deeply traumatized by the whole childhood acting thing is like, ‘Do not put me there. I don’t want to go anywhere near that,’” he says.

Wheaton insists he’s done with acting.

“I am retired from on-camera acting,” he said. “I haven’t booked an audition in 20 years, maybe even longer. The entertainment industry is not buying what I’m selling, and that’s okay.”

Wheaton first opened up about being “forced” into showbiz in 2021. “My mother made me do it,” he told Yahoo at the time. He started appearing in commercials at age 7 and recalled auditioning and acting while experiencing “incredible emotional abuse from my father, and a lot of manipulation, using me, from my mother.” He said those experiences were especially painful while he filmed his breakout 1986 hit, Stand by Me.

“Gordie’s experience very much reflected my experience,” Wheaton said. “We’re both invisible in our homes. We both have a brother who is the golden child. We’re both the scapegoat in the family.”

Now, he says, he has found his calling as a storyteller.

“The artist that I am, the artist Rob Reiner woke up, the artist that Rob Reiner showed me I really was," Wheaton says, "narrating audiobooks and writing little things, little essays and stuff like that. But every now and then, someone says, ‘Would you come be an actor on this thing?’”

That invitation led to his cameo in Stuart Fails to Save the Universe.

Courtesy HBO Max Wil Wheaton guest starred in an episode of "Stuart Fails to Save the Universe." www.advocate.com

Fans and his 1.3 million Instagram followers also see Wheaton’s daily photos showing off his “bed head,” a rotating collection of message-emblazoned coffee cups, tees adorned with punk band names, selfies with his wife, and pictures of their beloved pets.

He’s traded studio cameras for a microphone in a recording studio, where he records audiobooks. His work includes Andy Weir’s The Martian, Stephen King’s novella The Body — the basis for Stand by Me — and Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

For the past year, he’s also recorded a weekly podcast, It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, featuring work by new and emerging authors. Wheaton tells The Advocate that he doesn’t earn money from the project, but that doesn’t trouble him.

“I love to tell stories,” he says with a broad smile. “I can use everything I learned as an actor when I didn’t want to be an actor, and I can use it to give my literal voice to other creative people. It feels so good. It’s so fun.”

The games that helped him find his people

As a self-described nerd, Wheaton also has a huge following from his popular TableTop gaming web series.

TableTop was part of Day’s Geek & Sundry network. Day also created and starred in The Guild, a web series about a dysfunctional group of gamers who play an online fantasy role-playing game. The series ran for six seasons.

Unfortunately, as Wheaton has written, another company owns the rights to TableTop and has declined to sell them back.

Wheaton and Day plan to celebrate The Guild’s 20th anniversary with a new project, The Guild: Ren Faire’d. Its Kickstarter campaign raised $6.9 million.

Their other project is a new gaming series called Conludo, a Latin word Wheaton loosely translates as “let’s play together.”

“It’s going to be about the conversation,” Wheaton says. “The game will be a part of it, for sure, but it’s not going to be as intense. It’s not going to be focused on how the different rules work and how the different moves play out.”

“Thank goodness for gaming,” says Wheaton, who has played board games as long as he can remember.

“When I was a little boy, my great-aunt Val was the only loving, positive, nurturing adult in my life,” he recalls. “And she played games with me. She taught me how to play cards. She taught me how to play bingo. She taught me how to use your imagination.”

At 12, Aunt Val introduced Wheaton to Dungeons & Dragons, and he found friends who also played.

“I was definitely an at-risk kid,” he says. “When I was a teenager, I was very lonely, and my parents were as bad as they ever were. My father was as abusive and neglectful as he would ever be. ... The thing that saved my life was tabletop games.”

He also found his people among fellow gamers and his Star Trek castmates.

What Star Trek means to Wheaton now

On September 8, the Star Trek franchise marked its 60th anniversary, but Wheaton says he was not invited to participate in the official celebration.

“It was a complicated day for me,” he says. “No one from Star Trek official reached out to me for any participation, and that hurt my feelings, especially considering the role I had in the franchise. ... I just think it reflects the lack of care that Paramount is giving Star Trek right now.”

Paramount is led by CEO David Ellison, a friend of President Donald Trump. Wheaton worries that the company could change the franchise for ideological reasons.

“Star Trek is so progressive, and it has always been progressive,” he says.

Wheaton adds that the franchise was slow to recognize same-sex couples, pointing to Star Trek: Discovery as a turning point. Seeing yourself represented in its imagined future, he says, can bring comfort — just as he found comfort in characters who reminded him of himself.

“They feel comfort the same way I feel seen, and I feel comfort when I see a super smart kid that nobody listens to," Wheaton says. "Like, ‘Oh man, that’s me! I can be in the future, too!’ That’s what Star Trek does.”