Yahoo Movies Stranger Things stars say supersize season 4 is 'like 5 movies rolled into 1'
If you couldn't tell by the sheer runtime of the new episodes, Stranger Things season 4 is quite a bit longer than your average drama series. That means there's a lot of story packed into it. Like, a lot!
When the stars of Stranger Things gathered for the latest installment of EW's Around the Table series, they likened it to "five movies rolled into one." Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike, rattles them off: "We have a stoner action-comedy, we have a Russian prison movie, we have a Scooby-Doo-meets-Zodiac-killer storyline… And it works!"
Season 4 is split between three main locations — excluding the Upside Down, of course. One is California, where Joyce (Winona Ryder) moved her family to get away from the horrors of Hawkins, Ind. There, a now-powerless Eleven is getting bullied at school, but Millie Bobby Brown says her arc also features El "revisiting traumatizing experiences and really gaining this autonomy from the men in her life, finding what kind of woman she's going to be moving forward on her own."
By revisiting these memories, El hopes to regain her powers to fight the latest dangers that now plague Hawkins.
Netflix Gaten Matarazzo, Joe Keery, Sadie Sink, and Maya Hawke on 'Stranger Things'
"We haven't quite had the ability to move on from anything in Hawkins," says Gaten Matarazzo. "And after everything that happened at Starcourt Mall, the town knows that there's something quite not right anymore. And there are a lot of secrets in town that seem to be bubbling up rapidly that all of us are trying our best to suppress, but of course, in Stranger Things fashion, it isn't going to go as planned."
Vecna, a new demo-creature linked to the haunted Creel House, is now terrorizing Hawkins and claiming victims. Without El, the others are forced to deal with it on their own.
Meanwhile, Joyce gets a mysterious package that confirms Hopper (David Harbour) is alive and being held in a Russian prison. So she enlists her favorite conspiracy theorist, Murray (Brett Gelman), to join her international rescue mission.
Harbour says Hopper is in "a brutal environment" after secretly surviving the events of the season 3 finale, though we get to learn more about his backstory: "He has these secrets that have kept him from being the father, the man that he wants to be, and he needs to purge these secrets on the inside to move forward and be the warrior that can be necessary in this fight against the Upside Down."
Stranger Things season 4 premieres its first volume this Friday, with volume 2 arriving July 1. Watch the full Around the Table conversation above.
Related content:
