With the fifth and final instalment of the Duffer Brothers’ hit Netflix series Stranger Things dropping on our screens, it’s been a time of reflection for the show’s young cast. They were between 11 and 14 years old when they began filming in 2015, and they’ve grown up on set with the show.
Now fully fledged actors in their 20s, they’re much too professional to drop any spoilers about how the story ends or what’s in store for each of their characters, but as they draw a curtain on a significant chapter of their own lives, Millie Bobby Brown and Noah Schnapp, along with their fellow original cast members Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin, share their favourite endings of all time – and their feelings after wrapping Stranger Things – in exclusive interviews with Backstage.
“One of my favourite endings to a movie is Once,” says Matarazzo (Dustin), admiring John Carney’s 2007 movie in which musicians Guy and Girl part ways, leaving audiences guessing as to what could have been. “It’s so weirdly not cinematic, but hits so much harder because of it. I think it’s brilliant and it encapsulates that nice little unexpected moment that they had so well.”
On the contrary, Wolfhard (Mike) prefers films to go out with a bang. “I like the ending of Uncut Gems,” he says, “where Adam Sandler [playing Howard Ratner] gets shot in the face!”
It’s perhaps no wonder that for Brown (Eleven), the ending of the Harry Potter series holds so much resonance. “I think my favourite film is the last one. I think it’s very similar [to Stranger Things] in many ways because you’re following these children and you’re trying to tie their storylines and character arcs together toward the end,” she says. “It’s probably the same amount of runtime – what, 10 years for them? – [as it was for us].”
Endings aside, Brown says her overall favourite movie is Richard Curtis’ 2013 film About Time, which, despite its time-hopping story, also resonates with her own experience. “[Domhnall Gleeson’s Tim] keeps going into the closet…and he’s able to go back to a certain memory and change it, but then at the end of the movie he [spends] one day where he just lives in the present. He says thank you to the cashier lady…he’s spending more time with his children, he’s off his phone – like, that is how I lived this season [filming Stranger Things],” she says. “I have no regrets and I’m very proud of the work I’ve done. I’m not going back in the closet. I’ve watched that movie three or four times; I watched it with my in-laws the other day, and they loved it. I was like, ‘Ah, I brought a great family flick! Yes!”
Although the young Stranger Things cast had several professional credits among them when they landed their roles on the show as tweens and teens, they honed much of their craft on set. “Learning to be vulnerable” helped Schnapp unlock the essence of Will Byers. “You just have to not care that anyone’s watching,” he says. Brown agrees, adding: “You leave your humility at the door for sure.”
Looking back, would they do anything differently? “I do watch and I go, ‘Ummm, OK, skip ahead’,” Brown says. “But I’m proud of it nonetheless. I know I could tweak a few things, but I could truly do that about everything.… I could walk through life doing that, but it’s not worth it.”
“Sign me up for reshoots!” says Schnapp, who, like Brown, was only 11 years old when the show started filming. “I just would love to tweak little things here and there in everything I watch.”
Matarazzo often wonders, “What was I thinking while doing this?” when watching old episodes. “You just grow and learn about yourself,” he says. “[But] I don’t think I would go back and change anything.” Wolfhard, too, feels detached from, but intrigued by, his earlier performances. “Each year I watch a season, I do see myself grow and make different decisions I wouldn’t have made the year before.”
McLaughlin (Lucas) wishes he wasn’t so hard on himself. “I look back and I’m like, ‘Dude, you were just a cute kid’,” he says. “I really wish I was in the moment. That’s what’s rich about the show, because it does show growth…and people can relate to that.”
Whether their characters manage to fully vanquish the evil presences in Hawkins and the Upside Down remains to be seen, but with filming wrapped for good, it was “bittersweet” to say goodbye to it, Brown says. “It’s hitting now, honestly,” she says. “It’s very hard to think about doing this for one last time with your friends, reflecting on your childhood so intimately. [The press tour] kind of feels like therapy in a way.”
For Schnapp, too, the closure of that chapter of his life took a while to set in. “I [found myself] thinking, I don’t want to work on anything else; I just want to do Stranger Things forever,” he says. “Now it really feels over; I’m just so devastated I will never get that back, that experience on set.”
But McLaughlin acknowledges it’s “good sad.” “Usually, moments when you feel sad, you try to avoid it,” he says. “But I want to experience this moment; I want to cry, and I love that we were able to experience this.”
For Wolfhard, the reality of it being over – forever – didn’t set in until the following day. “I was like, ‘Man, that was the saddest thing ever. I don’t know if I’ll ever get over that’,” he says. But with a bit of distance, he’s able to look back on the behind-the-scenes sealing of the Stranger Things world as “one of the best days of my life.”