Volume One of Stranger Things Season 4 promises to take the show into new, scarier places. While the previous seasons have left the core group of Hawkins kids with their share of trauma, this new season will deliver not just new supernatural monsters but the relatable and very real-world horrors of high school. At a roundtable attended by CBR, the cast of Stranger Things, including Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas), Sadie Sink (Max), Priah Ferguson (Erica), and Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin), dove into Season 4.
The new season separates the core group more than ever, with the Byers family and Eleven moving out to California. “I think just having someone leave the party kind of shakes up the dynamic a bit,” Sadie Sink explained. “It feels different, and everyone’s just in such different places.” “It’s a pretty relatable situation,” Gaten Matarazzo added. “I think a lot of people had a good friend they had when they were younger — in elementary, middle school — and moved away at some point. I had a couple. So yeah, that was always rough.” The time period in the show also complicated the long-distance friendship. “In the ’80s,” Matarazzo continued, “it’s hard to keep in touch as well. That separation, it’s upsetting. It’s sad for the group. It’s going to be sad for people to see, I think.”
Of course, the group still has friends in Hawkins, and they’ve made some new ones as they entered high school. When asked about how his new friendship with Dungeon Master Eddie affects the fan-favorite pairing of Dustin and Steve, Matarazzo said, “Of course, Dustin and Steve are incredibly, incredibly close. Because Eddie goes to school and runs the Hellfire Club, he naturally grows close to him. I don’t know if there’s a bit of a tug-of-war there, but I guess you’ll have to wait and see.”
The move to high school has broken down other relationships with the core group, however. Lucas, in particular, has tried to branch out and explore activities beyond Dungeons & Dragons, like basketball, which drives a wedge between the friends. When asked why Lucas tries so hard to hang onto Mike, Dustin, and Max when they seem to undervalue him, Caleb McLaughlin commended that interpretation of his character’s actions. “I feel like he’s trying to keep them,” he explained, “because he still feels a part of them inside of him. They’ve been his friends forever. He still feels like a nerd, but he wants to experience this new world with them.”
“I don’t think he wants to exactly dive into this whole new, cool guy, jock thing,” Mclaughlin continued, “but I think they probably did have this conversation over the summer like, ‘We’re going to go into high school and just be this. We’re going to be new and evolved people.’ When he got there, he was the first one to jump to it, and he’s really serious about it. His friends were like, ‘Nah, it’s not who we are.’ Lucas is like, ‘Whoa, maybe that’s not who we are. Maybe we could just try this out and see what happens.’ I feel like a lot of kids can relate to that because when you go into high school, in your adolescence, you kind of get lost, and you forget who you are sometimes. You have to remind yourself. You have to actually step outside the box [and] see and appreciate the person that you are and who you were.”
With the shift to high school comes additional non-supernatural horror for the characters to navigate. McLaughlin addressed the realistic horror they go through this season, saying, “I think it’s very interesting. Lucas has dealt with so much in terms of supernatural events, but now he’s kind of dealing with himself. I feel that, because of the separation this season between the group, he’s like, ‘Alright, what can I do?’ What happiness can he find [and] different things? I mean, his world has expanded so much. Now he’s just trying to figure out certain things that he can do for himself. I wish I could touch on that a little bit more, just to go into depth, but I just feel like a lot of people can relate to that. It’s pretty realistic. Lucas, he’s had to mature faster than the average kid — teenager — because he’s dealt with unworldly things. It’s life, and Lucas, he’ll be fine. He’s gonna get through it.”
With this realistic horror comes dealing with the trauma of seasons past. Sink addressed how important it was for the characters to acknowledge and deal with how Season 3 ended. “I was really excited,” she said, “because I think it was time in the show to explore how these events over the past few seasons are affecting our characters. Max was kind of the perfect candidate for that in losing her brother and everything like that and at Starcourt.”
“That’s obviously caused a lot of changes in her life,” Sink concluded. “As a result, she’s just feeling lost and in a lot of pain. The way that Max deals with that, and has always dealt with that, is just shutting herself off and trying to keep it to herself. It’s sad to watch her close herself off from the people in her life that want to help her, but she’s stubborn. It was nice to be able to explore that side of her and kind of dig deeper and peel back some of those layers.”
While high school may be changing things for many of the Hawkins crew, fan-favorite character Erica is still thriving in middle school. In the very first episode of the season, Erica gets a moment to save the day for Mike and Dustin, and it seems like she’ll be integral going forward. CBR asked Priah Ferguson about what viewers can expect from her expanded role and whether she’ll have more save-the-day moments this season. “We definitely see her step in as a leader. She’s very confident. Erica has always kind of been confident, a little bit. I think she’s just really trying to help out where she can. Without giving too much away and kind of digging myself into the spoiler view — I’m not gonna say too much — but Erica definitely steps in as a leader this season to help everyone out through this tough time.”
Ferguson also spoke about how she psyched herself up for her D&D scene. “When first doing the scene, I didn’t really know too much about D&D. I know it was introduced in the show a lot of times, but I didn’t really know much about it. So I definitely did my research. I looked at blogs about it. I’m more of a hands-on person, so I won’t really fully understand it until I’m actually doing this, but before going into it, I got a little bit of an understanding just to see what I’m doing. I think after the scene, that’s when I fully knew what I was doing because me and Gaten got a chance of playing the game for press actually, and that was really, really fun. So I was really interested in playing, doing a campaign, even now because the game is so interesting.” Matarazzo added, “It makes me want to do it again.”
The ’80s setting of Stranger Things has always been part of the series’ charm. When asked whether the adult actors on set had told them any stories about their childhoods in the ’80s, Sink explained that “Winona [Ryder] has a lot of great advice especially, not only living in the ’80s, being a kid in the ’80s, but being a child actor in the ’80s. She has a lot of sage advice that she’d pass on to all of us.”
Matarazzo added that “she always is very, very adamant about making sure that we feel comfortable and feel safe and that we’re enjoying ourselves because that’s the most important thing when you start acting. You need to make sure that you enjoy it because a lot of people, we started to get propelled into careers that are very fortunate and amazing, but sometimes there are a lot of kids who get into it who just don’t really like doing it that much. That’s completely okay. It’s just a matter of making sure that you do it because you like it, and she’s always been very, very supportive in that.”
When asked about whether the geographical distance between their characters made this season feel different, Matarazzo described that “I think every season just feels different every single year. It feels like it grows so much.” “We’ve had like three other seasons that [are] totally different from Season 1,” McLaughlin added. “So I think I’m kind of just used to change. The cast has expanded so much, but even the newcomers, it doesn’t even feel like they weren’t even here in Season 1. I think that’s the best thing about our show is it’s not the same. It changes every time and evolves. Even this season, not even with the actors but the camera crew, even the director. The Duffers [Creators Matt and Ross Duffer] are getting better. They’re amazing. Even the writing is just, there’s so much more depth to the story, and the vision of everything is — it’s amazing.”
The actors have also been busy working on other projects outside of Stranger Things. When asked about how these other roles have inspired or prepared her, Sink described that “the physicality of Fear Street really helped, just getting comfortable with a lot of stunt work and stuff in that realm. Then I did a movie with Darren Aronofsky that was very dramatic, and I think that helped with the more emotional stuff in this season a lot. So yeah, a lot of it contributed to crafting my performance this year and just getting into the mindset of Max, too. A lot of it has to do with her innermost thoughts. Every night before I go to set, I write a journal entry or something like that, which is the classic acting thing, just writing a journal entry as your character or something to think about what’s going on in their head that the camera might not know, to just keep it kind of alive.”
Volume One of Stranger Things Season 4 arrives on Netflix May 27.
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