55 Things You Didn't Know About 'Stranger Things'
55 Things You Didn't Know About 'Stranger Things'
You've already finished your Stranger Things binge (or binges—we won't judge) and you're eagerly awaiting the arrival of Season 4 on May 27th. This time around, prepare for scenes outside everyone's favorite creepy fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana—something that hasn't been done on the show yet. The gang, now all grown up, will be returning to battle the monsters of the Upside Down. Sounds exciting, right? While you wait, click through to discover 50 things you didn't know about your favorite show.
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It was created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer.
They made a movie, Hidden, and worked on M. Night Shyamalan’s Wayward Pines before writing a script based on the premise, "What if Steven Spielberg directed a Stephen King book?"
The show was originally called “Montauk.”
It took place on Long Island in 1980, but the Duffers had to change the show's location when they realized it would be too difficult to shoot there in winter.
The Montauk Project inspired the show.
The alleged government experiment took place in the early '80s and involved kidnapping kids from Long Island to experiment on them. You can read all about it here.
The Duffers auditioned 906 boys and 307 girls for the children's roles.
And they made each kid read parts from Stand By Me in the audition.
The now-iconic title sequence was inspired by motion graphics designer Richard Greenberg.
He designed the titles for films including Alien, Superman and The Goonies.
The Upside Down's real name is the Nether.
But they got so used to calling it the "Upside Down" on set, it stuck, Millie Bobby Brown revealed in Beyond Stranger Things. The same thing happened with the Shadow Monster in Season 2; it's supposed to be called the Mind Flayer.
The Duffers cast Gaten Matarazzo after watching his first audition tape.
"When you see someone like Gaten, and he pops the way he does, you’re just like, 'This kid, we’re putting him in the show, 100 percent,'" Matt told the New York Times.
Gaten Matarazzo, Sadie Sink and Caleb McLaughlin knew each other before filming the show.
The three young stars had already met each other after starring on Broadway at the same time. Matarazzo was in Les Misérables, Sink was in Annie and McLaughlin was in The Lion King.
Stephen King "found" Millie Bobby Brown.
Long before the Duffers cast her as Eleven, King tweeted his love for Brown on the British show Intruders: “Millie Brown, the girl in Intruders, is terrific. Is it my imagination, or are child actors a lot better than they used to be?”
The Duffers convinced Winona Ryder to play Joyce during a four-and-a-half-hour meeting.
“We actually talked very little about the show or the character of Joyce; we were mostly just getting to know each other,” the Duffers told EW. Ryder joined the project the next day.
Finn Wolfhard is a movie fanatic.
He already watched all the movies the Duffer Brothers assigned for research, Ross told the NYT.
In the original script, the teens (Nancy, Jonathan and Steve) used the Christmas lights to find the monster.
But one of the writers pitched the idea of Joyce using them to communicate with Will. "Seeing Winona react with joy, then terror, then hope to a glowing ball of Christmas lights is now one of our favorite scenes from the show," they write in EW.
Season 4 took two years to film.
It involved nine scripts, 800 pages, thousands of visual effect shots, and "a runtime nearly twice the length of any previous season," the Duffers revealed in an open letter to fans.
David Harbour wanted Hopper to wear a hat in homage to Indiana Jones.
"Early on, he even asked if we could have a giant boulder roll after him at one point in the show," the Duffers wrote in EW. "We’re still not sure if he was joking or not."
Joyce’s hairstyle was inspired by Meryl Streep in <i>Silkwood.</i>
Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Marsha Mason in Max Dugan Returns and Audrey Rose influenced Winona Ryder's performance.
It was Caleb McLaughlin’s idea for Lucas to wear a bandana in Season 1.
"Sometimes our kids have great ideas, and this is one of those times!" the Duffers told EW.
Steve was supposed to be "the biggest douchebag on the planet."
"A lot of credit goes to Joe Keery because he was much more likable and charming than we originally had envisioned," Ross Duffer told Variety.
Matthew Modine helped to create his character, Dr. Brenner.
Dr. Brenner was particularly hard for the Duffers to write because you see the character so little on the show. "He informed it, and I’m really happy with where we wound up with him at the end, with something that was discovered during the course of shooting," Matt Duffer told Empire.
Brown’s performance was inspired by E. T.
“Matt and Ross were like, ‘Basically you’re going to be an alien,'" she told Indiewire.
The Duffers used the fake body of Will to scare Noah Schnapp's mother.
"We took Noah’s mom aside, told her we had something to show her, and led her into a dark closet where we had propped up this frighteningly realistic corpse of her son," they write in EW. "She was startled at first, and we felt like maybe we crossed a line… But after the initial shock, she loved it."
Millie Bobby Brown once showed up to set covered in glitter.
It held up production for a half hour, the Duffer Brothers told EW.
Production did, in fact, use 1,200 pounds of Epsom salts...
...to make Brown float in the kiddie pool.
The show's colorist adds scanned ’80s film grain to each frame...
...to give the series a vintage vibe, the Duffers tell EW.
Barb was Shannon Purser's first role.
"I was thinking, this is the biggest thing I've ever done and how cool would it be if I actually got this? And I did!" she tells Esquire.
Season 5 will be the last one.
It doesn't come as a surprise, since it was always the Duffers' plan to end the show after four of five seasons. But don't worry—they aren't ruling out the possibility of a spinoff show with new characters down the line.
The cast was left in tears after hearing that the show was ending.
"I just started bawling," Noah Schnapp told Jimmy Fallon of learning that Season 5 would be the series finale. "I was upset. I texted Millie, my castmate who plays Eleven and she was like, 'You're crying too? So am I!' Then she texted Gaten, who plays Dustin, and he was like 'I'm crying too!'"
The Demogorgon is an animatronic.
And it scared the little kids on set, including the twins who played Holly Wheeler and Millie Bobby Brown's little sister. Someone told the kids the monster came from Monstropolis in Monsters, Inc. to calm them down, the Duffers wrote in EW.
The movement of the “petals” on the Demogorgon’s head never repeat.
“They had a life of their own, moving in unpredictable and bizarre patterns,” the Duffers told EW.
The show’s music is composed by Michael Stein and Kyle Dixon, members of the band S U R V I V E.
The Duffers heard their music when it was used in the film The Guest, they told EW, and convinced Stein and Dixon to quit their day jobs to work on the show full time.
An average of 8.8 million people watched <i>Stranger Things 2</i> in its first three days on Netflix.
And 361,000 people watched all nine episodes in its first 24 hours.
Dustin says "totally tubular" in reference to Max's California heritage.
In 1984, everyone thought Californians sounded like Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Brown cried after filming the scene with Papa in Season 2.
She called it one of the hardest scenes she's ever filmed on Beyond Stranger Things.
Dacre Montgomery danced shirtless to “Come on Eileen” in his audition tape.
He also wore a G-string. "I was thinking: Either I'm never going to work again, or somebody somewhere is going to see one thing in me, and they'll give me a chance," he told GQ. The Duffers loved it." I’ve watched thousands of auditions now, and it’s by far the most bonkers that I’ve witnessed," Ross told Vulture.
Millie Bobby Brown almost quit acting before she landing <i>Stranger Things</i>.
"I felt at one point I couldn’t do it [anymore], but then I got this and everything changed,” she told Variety.
Bob wanting to move to Maine is, indeed, a reference to Stephen King.
But Matt Duffer notes, “Bob definitely does not read Stephen King… he hates that kind of story.“
Ryder helped Schnapp with his performance in Season 2.
“There was this one that I was worried about. So I just texted her, ‘Hey, can you help me with this? Can you come in and talk to me about it?’ And she came in like an hour and a half earlier than she was called in for and she brought me in her trailer and she talked to me," Schnapp told Vulture. "She gave me tips and guided me how to do the scene. And she was like, ‘You’ll do it. You’ll do great.’”
Gaten Matarazzo came up with the idea for Dustin's "purr."
It's based on his Chewbacca impression.
Brown has CG hair for the flashback scenes in Season 2.
“It’s kind of expensive, so thank God it was only for that one short sequence," Matt told Vulture. "We wouldn’t have been able to do that the whole season."
David Harbour didn't use a stunt double for Eleven's "psychic tantrum."
Matt calls it a "really intense day of shooting."
Steve’s Risky Business costume is a nod to Nancy’s love for Tom Cruise.
“There’s a Tom Cruise poster in Nancy’s room,” Matt told Vulture. “Apparently, Tom Cruise is just [like], 'If you want to use that poster, you can use it for free.' He just loves that picture of himself, I guess. There were no problems getting rights to that."
Erica Sinclair was supposed to have a much smaller role.
“[Priah Ferguson] was just a local hire we made in Atlanta," Matt told Yahoo. "Erica wasn’t even supposed to be in [Season 2] as much as she was. We fell in love with this girl... I thought she’s very GIF-able, if that’s a word."
The Duffers had to ask <i>Ghostbusters</i> director Ivan Reitman's permission to use the costumes.
They were very nervous about the phone call. "His tone was very serious. He seemed very skeptical, and he was like, 'Can you explain why you want to use Ghostbusters in this?' Matt recalled to Vulture. "We had this very nervous speech about what Ghostbusters meant to us... He made us go through the exercise, but he’d already decided to let us do it. He was like, 'We’re very flattered by it. Of course we’d love to have you use it.'”
The best relationship in Season 2 wasn’t part of the original script.
“When we first pitched the season there was no Dustin and Steve bromance,” Ross revealed in Beyond Stranger Things. “These are two characters that are both a little heartbroken, so we thought that they could help heal each other.”
They used chopped beef and watermelon for the raw meat in the train track scene.
And Sadie Sink was grossed out because she's a vegetarian.
Sadie Sink was almost too tall for the role of Max.
She told New York magazine, "At one point, they told me, ‘Oh, we think you’re too tall. I don’t know if we should let you read for it again because you’re too tall.'" The team behind the show worried she would tower over the boys, but luckily, they grew to match her height.
Bob was supposed to die much earlier in Season 2.
Ross Duffer told EW they originally planned to kill Bob around Episode 4, but they liked Sean Astin so much, they kept him alive until Episode 8.
And Will was supposed to kill him.
The Mind Flayer would've killed Bob through Will, the Duffers revealed on Beyond Stranger Things.
Dart is completely CGI.
Stranger Things 2 had a much bigger visual effects team than Season 1, the Duffers revealed.
Sean Astin asked for a violent death for Bob.
In the Stranger Things 2 after show, Beyond Stranger Things, Ross Duffer revealed, “We were not going to make it as memorable as we did, and then he kept talking about Jaws and Quint being ripped apart, and I was like, all right man, we’ll do it."
The cast group chat is called “Stranger Texts.”
But according to a Vulture profile, they prefer to play board games and cards on set rather than bring their phones.
David Harbour ships Joyce and Hopper, which he dubbed #Jopper.
He said as much in Beyond Stranger Things. Don't we all, though?
The Duffers asked Warner Bros. if they could direct a remake of <i>It</i>.
And WB said no.
Netflix wanted to shoot Seasons 3 and 4 back to back.
But the Duffers and their executive producers said no.
Millie Bobby Brown wants her character to get married at the very end.
When asked how she envisions Eleven's storyline coming to a close, the actress told Glamour: "She loves Mike–I want them to get married. That’s what I need. I need a wedding scene for Stranger Things, period. Eleven in a wedding dress and her going, 'Sorry, my nose is bleeding. It’s a white dress.' Doesn’t it just seem like it would fit?"
Here, 55 things you didn't know about season 1 or 2 of Stranger Things.