Joe Keery Isn’t Done Surprising You Yet
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It’s 10:00 A.M. for Joe Keery when he sits down to talk to me over Zoom, hair dripping from a shower and clad in a Henley shirt. We’re chatting on the Thursday after Memorial Day weekend, and the thirty-two-year-old actor already has a plan for the rest of his day. He’ll meet up with some friends, take advantage of Los Angeles’ empty music studios post-holiday, and go out for a big walk, as he calls it, to get his big steps in.
“So, a hot girl walk?” I ask.
“Hot girl walk...what’s a hot girl walk?” Keery asks, genuinely curious. He doesn’t have social media, and the HGW is very much a product of lockdown-era TikTok.
“Tell me,” he says, so I dutifully get him up to speed: You put on a fun outfit, go for a long walk, take in some fresh air, and grab a treat on the way home. Keery listens so attentively that he looks like The Thinker—fist under his chin, laser-focused in his tiny Zoom box.
“Oh, this is me every day,” Keery says. “I do this all the time—get dressed, walk around, stop for coffee, and walk around more.”
Keery has retreated to the West Coast from Atlanta during a few days off from filming the fifth and final season of Stranger Things. Before he can embark on his hot girl walk, though, Keery is stationed in the kitchenette of his hotel room to chat with me. Netflix’s Stranger Things has been shooting for weeks, and for all I know, Keery could have just shot Steve Harrington’s (his character on the show) tragic death. Even so, he gives away nothing—and claims that he doesn’t know how the series ends.
As Keery wraps up Stranger Things, he’s stepping into a new chapter of his career, one marked by his diametric role as egotistical, insecure, snarky Gator Tillman in the latest season of Fargo. Gator is the poster child of daddy issues and the antithesis of Harrington—look no further than the taming of Keery’s voluminous hair, which was slicked down to his skull for the role. He’s also the musician Djo (pronounced “Joe,” get it?), with two psychedelic, soft-indie-rock records under his belt and a third on the way. Saying that Keery has had a hell of a year is a vast understatement—he’s had a hell of a decade.
It would be all too easy for Keery to keep taking Harrington-esque, boy-next-door roles. Steve is the role that launched him from a working actor waiting tables into the highest echelons of Hollywood. Keery knows that. But he wants more. He now has the freedom to seek work he’s truly passionate about—whether that’s Fargo, the anthology series he had already been a fan of (along with the 1996 film), or his music, a space where he “doesn’t feel beholden to anyone” and can do whatever he wants.
“As a young guy thinking about this business, you think, Oh, I want to do this and this and that,” Keery reflects. “Obviously, you do have some power of your own, but things will also just happen in the way they will. I personally believe—and it’s best for my own mental well-being—that what’s going to happen is going to happen.”
He pauses. Takes a few moments to consider his younger self, the twenty-three-year-old who showed up on the Stranger Things set in 2015, back at a time when he was booking commercials for companies like KFC and Domino’s. What would he tell that version of him now?
“Relax. Chill out. Enjoy it. Trust in yourself.”
About halfway through the eighth episode of Fargo season 5, Gator pays a visit to Dorothy (Juno Temple). She’s been kidnapped, chained to a bed, and locked in a shed by Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm)—Gator’s horrifyingly abusive, racist, sexist, all-American-alpha-male father. Dorothy tells Gator that she encountered his mother—the woman who abandoned him as a child, leaving him to fend for himself against his father, because Roy would have killed her if she’d stayed around. If Gator helps Dorothy escape, they can reach her together.
Dorothy is telling the truth, offering Gator an escape from the clutches of his father. But he’s afraid. As Gator is walking out, Dorothy says, “Did you ever wonder why you’re not named Roy? Your name’s supposed to be Roy, but your dad said he took one look at you in the hospital—this pale, puny lizard—and he knew you’d be a loser for life. Said he’d rather have his name die out than have you to carry it.” Gator tells Dorothy he hopes she dies in the shed and never sees her daughter again. He leaves her in there and slams the door behind him.
So, yeah—we aren’t in Steve Harrington territory anymore.
Get a Taste of Joe Keery on Fargo
“[Fargo] was unlike anything I had ever done,” says Keery. “It was a little difficult to see myself doing it, because it does seem outside of the box of opportunities I had been given. But those are the things I’m super interested in trying to do. It’s what I loved about [Gator]. His complex relationship with his father—it’s the root of all the problems in his life.”
It’s clear that Gator is still with Keery, who is ever-so-slowly veering the interview into teletherapy territory: “If you put somebody in an environment like this, is it possible for them to have an ounce of good mortality inside of them? Or are they destined and doomed to wrongdoing and loneliness?” he muses.
Nature versus nurture aside, Gator’s ending is hopeful. He loses both of his eyes and goes to prison, but before he’s carted away, Dorothy promises to visit him with his favorite cookies.
“Everyone is on the chopping block all season, and to end that with this scene of offering and forgiveness felt like, Man, what a great way to end it. Because the world does need that. Someone has to be the first one to forgive.”
Hope? Believing the best outcome will happen? It’s in Keery’s music, in the depth he gave to Gator, and certainly in his approach to choosing roles. There was hope in the nervous excitement he had on the first day of shooting Fargo, and even the project that started it all: Stranger Things.
Seeing the cultural phenomenon that is Stranger Things now, you’d have to wonder how anyone couldn’t have faith in the show. But once upon a time, it was just a bizarre Netflix project with a bunch of little-known actors and a couple bigger names. No one could anticipate what would happen next: Stranger Things became Netflix’s shining jewel, acquiring more than 52 billion weekly viewed minutes in its fourth season. It gave Winona Ryder a thrilling next act and made Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, and Joe Keery household names. To be clear: Keery didn’t know any of this would happen, either. But he was on board from the get-go.
“I loved the script and the mood,” he says of his first impression of the show. “It was so simple: This boy goes missing, and there’s all of these other characters. Everyone was really fresh and eager, and then there was David [Harbour] and Matthew [Modine] and Winona [Ryder], these amazing heavyweights. I was on cloud nine. Even from the first day being on set, I knew that at least I was going to like it.”
When Keery talks about Stranger Things, he’s predictably coy, saying as little as possible about the final season. Really, I get the sense that he’d rather not talk about Stranger Things at all. “I got nothing,” he says with a Netflix-will-kill-me-if-I-tell-you-anything tone. “Nothing at all. I mean, I can say we’re working on it. Maybe I can’t even say that. So you got that at least.”
It isn’t until I mention Keery’s castmates that his mood shifts. He's suddenly solemn. “It’s a unique experience to be on a ride with people for this long, and one that I’m sure I will not experience again,” he says. “I’m just trying to soak it up and enjoy the presence of other people.”
The Stranger Things cast is a close-knit group—Keery says they keep in contact away from the set—and even though he’s spent most of his adult life in this role, even though he’s stepping into Steve Harrington’s shoes for the last time, he’ll miss his castmates the most.
On the topic of his costars, Keery is speaking with so much overt sincerity that I’m fearing an Eddie Munson–esque fate for half the ensemble. I hope for Keery’s sake—just slightly more than for Stranger Things fans’—that Steve escapes from Vecna’s claws unscathed.
You’ve probably gathered this by now: Joe Keery is full of surprises. The biggest one? It’s what happens when he puts on a shaggy orange wig and strings a guitar across his chest. He goes from Joe to Djo. When I bring up Djo, Keery sits forward in his seat, eyes lit up. He hasn’t performed live as wig-wearing Djo since 2022 (and is unsure if the ’do will make an appearance the next time he does), but he’s been working on his third studio album since the fall of that year.
“The goal was to have [Djo] not be connected to Stranger Things, mostly,” Keery says. His roots are in music; before Stranger Things, he was in the psychedelic Chicago-based band Post Animal. Now, every time one of Djo’s songs goes viral, so do hundreds of videos of people realizing that Djo and Joe Keery are the same person. Keery isn’t necessarily trying to hide his alter ego, but he’s not trying to advertise it, either.
“I really like that people can discover it and put two and two together—that’s probably fun. [The wig] was also to disconnect….I have a little bit of a trolly nature deep down inside me. It’s fun to play with people’s expectations and surprise them.”
It helps that the songs are damn good. I dare you to listen to “Chateau (Feel Alright)” and tell me that Keery isn’t an introspective guy, or hear “Personal Lies” and not add it to your “background sounds for a smoke sesh” playlist. (It sure is on mine.)
Then, of course, there’s “End of Beginning”—the behemoth track from Djo’s 2022 album, DECIDE. The track spent the past few months reaching new levels of virality, boasting more than 732 million streams on Spotify and over 2.3 million posts on TikTok. It’s a trend to post TikToks with the song’s lyrics (“You take the man out of the city, not the city out the man/And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it/Another version of me, I was in it”) to share nostalgic before-and-after photos.
As a disbelieving Keery tells it, he “feels like [he’s] been given the keys to the castle.” He recorded chunk of the upcoming album at New York’s iconic Electric Lady Studios, home of the greats: the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, the Roots, and recently, Sabrina Carpenter and Lorde. He used to record at home and write wherever inspiration struck him. Keery recalls penning “Chateau” when he and his family were at his grandmother’s house, waiting to take turns in the home’s single shower. (His younger sister had a ukulele.) He drafts melodies in the backs of Ubers while heading to meetings and plays songs on the piano at Stranger Things costar Charlie Heaton’s Atlanta home. Now that he has access to professional studio equipment, it’s all about channeling his favorite hi-fi recordings. A bit of Daft Punk here, some Steely Dan there.
“To have a ton [of material to choose from] is awesome, but it also proves a different challenge with thinking: What exactly is the point of this record, and what am I trying to say?” Keery says. He talks with his hands, holding his arms on either side of his head so that I can see just how big the ton of material is. “I’m asking myself big questions like that and narrowing it down. It’s so fun making an album....People will listen to it; if they like it, cool; if they don’t, that’s cool. too.”
Later today, after our call, Keery will spend his day out and about, here and there. He’ll take his hot girl walk, grab a coffee, and go out to dinner. We say our goodbyes, and I do what most people do immediately after ending a conversation: pull up TikTok.
The first video on my feed is set to Djo’s “End of Beginning”—and it’s the least surprised I’ve been by Joe Keery all day.
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