Stranger Things season 4 cast: the actors, their characters, and their age at filming

The newcomers

Robert Englund, the Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street, is the season's horror wink, in the role of Victor Creel, the father accused of the 1959 murders. Jamie Campbell Bower was cast under a fake character name to preserve the Vecna surprise.

The group, at fifteen (played by actors of twenty)

Two years of filming, interrupted by the pandemic from March 2020 to September 2020: the actors aged on screen between the first and last scenes, which fed the debate on the age gap with their fifteen-year-old characters.

The high-schoolers and the adults

What becomes of the newcomers

Cast markers

How the newcomers were picked

As early as November 2019, production was looking for four new male characters: three teenagers, described as “a metalhead, an arrogant jock, and a Jeff Spicoli twin,” the stoner from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and an adult tied to the Russian plot. They are Eddie, Jason, Argyle, and Dmitri. Joseph Quinn, Mason Dye, Eduardo Franco, and Tom Wlaschiha were announced between February and November 2020.

Jamie Campbell Bower was introduced under the name “Peter Ballard,” and credited as a “friendly orderly” in the first six episodes, to hide that he was playing adult Henry Creel, One, and therefore Vecna. Robert Englund, the Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street, had himself contacted the Duffers for a role; he became Victor Creel.

Matthew Modine's return was supposed to stay secret until release. It was leaked on his first day of shooting, January 27, 2021, when a photographer caught him in a convertible in Atlanta.

The new faces of 1986

An eighteen-month shoot, cut by the pandemic

Filming started in February 2020 in Vilnius, Lithuania, in Lukiškės prison, just decommissioned, for the Kamchatka scenes. Back in Atlanta, it was interrupted on March 16, 2020 by the pandemic, after two weeks. It only resumed on September 28, 2020, and wrapped in September 2021, after sequences shot in New Mexico for Nevada, and around Rome, Georgia, where an 1882 house served as the facade of the Creel house.

That pause had a visible consequence: the actors of the group, born between 2002 and 2004, were between sixteen and nineteen when they took up characters of fourteen or fifteen again. The show owns it, and the Duffers have since explained that the aging of the cast weighed on the decision to finish in five seasons.

Eddie Munson, or how a one-season role becomes cult

Joseph Quinn, a British actor little known to the wider public before 2022, made Eddie the most loved character of the season in nine episodes. The role was written for a single season: the president of the Hellfire Club was supposed to die in the Upside Down, and he dies. But the response was such that Dustin still wears his T-shirt in 1987, that the last chapter's year-end speech is dedicated to him, and that Eddie's death remains, poll after poll, the most mourned in the show.

Eddie's case resembles Steve's in 2016 and Robin's in 2019: the show has a gift for creating, each season, a newcomer the audience adopts immediately. The difference is that the Duffers did not give in this time. Eddie did not come back, and the theories about his vampire resurrection, fed by the D&D handbook, stayed theories.

Frequently asked questions

Read next