“Stranger Things” Season 5 just got bigger.
The final season of Matt and Ross Duffer’s 1980s-set sci-fi blockbuster was already one of the most anticipated television events in recent memory. But at Netflix’s TUDUM fan event in Brazil on Saturday, the streaming giant upped the ante by announcing that action film legend Linda Hamilton is joining the cast for Season 5.
Hamilton is best known for playing Sarah Connor in the “Terminator” franchise, beginning with James Cameron’s original 1984 film and continuing through 2019’s “Terminator: Dark Fate.” Her casting adds one final dose of ’80s genre film pedigree to a cast that already stars Winona Ryder and has featured the likes of Robert Englund in smaller roles.
Little is known about the plot of Season 5, though the Duffer brothers have suggested that the series will continue to go down the increasingly dark path established in Season 4.
“[For] two hours, we pitched the full season to Netflix. We did get our executives to cry, which I thought was a good sign,” Matt Duffer said at a recent Netflix event. “The only other time I’ve seen them cry is like, budget meetings.”
Ross Duffer added that their writing process for Season 5 has placed particular emphasis on ensuring that the show’s many supporting characters get proper endings.
“We have so many characters now, most who are still living,” he said. “It’s important to wrap up those arcs as a lot of these characters have been growing since Season 1. So it’s a balancing act between giving them time to complete their character arcs and also tying up these loose ends and doing our final reveals.”
Appearing on the same panel, “Stranger Things” executive producer and director Shawn Levy teased that Season 5 will please fans of the show by staying true to the emotional core that made it a hit in the first place.
“The thing about these Duffer Brothers is that even though the show has gotten so famous, and the characters have gotten so iconic, and there’s so much about the ’80s, and the supernatural and the genre, it’s about these people,” Levy said. “It’s about the characters. And Season 5 already is so clearly taking care of these stories of characters, because that’s always been the lifeblood of ‘Stranger Things.’”
