The cast and creators of Stranger Things 5 turned up at Hollywood Forever Cemetery recently to discuss the final season of the supernatural Netflix series — an apt location for a group that is very familiar dealing with the otherworldly.
Creators Matt and Ross Duffer were joined by executive producer and director Shawn Levy as well as stars Jamie Campbell Bower, Noah Schnapp, Natalia Dyer and David Harbour for the chat after an FYSEE LA screening of the final episode, “The Rightside Up.” We were on the scene to shoot the latest episode of On the Go with Deadline, where they unpacked the moments that stick with them from Stranger Things 5.
When asked the scene that sticks with them the most, the final scene of the series — which sees the “kids,” as the Duffers still lovingly call them, play one last game of Dungeons and Dragons in the Wheeler basement — nearly unanimously prevailed.
“It was such a culmination of the 10 years,” Schnapp said. “I have the worst memory. I forget everything, and that is just something I cannot get out of my head — every hour of that day.”
Dyer agreed, calling her own final day of shooting on the roof of WSQK “a core memory for the rest of my life.”
“It was the most emotional scene to write, because it was the last scene we were ever writing [for these characters] and definitely the most emotional scene to film,” Matt Duffer added.
That said, there were a few things about the season that some of the cast wish they’d done differently. Harbour wanted more. More scenes with Hopper and Eleven. More of Hopper and Mike. “I wanted even a scene with Joe Keery,” he says. “But stories have to end in a certain way and they don’t get to go on and do whatever fan fiction I’m writing in my head.”
Bower, on the other hand? “I probably would’ve liked to have ended everyone, as Vecna,” he laughs.
Given the setting was a cemetery, it felt only right to wonder whether this group — who spent the last decade telling a story about a force from another dimension terrorizing some small-town kids — also believe in other types of paranormal activity.
The answer is yes. Well, Matt and Ross agreed they aren’t entirely sold on the idea of ghosts but they’ll be avoiding Ouija boards as much as they can just in case. A few of them even had their own ghost encounters to share, and Bower’s has a connection to this very show. While in the UK for a Vecna fitting, he says he was staying in a nunnery haunted by the spirits of two young children.
“I heard this running along the corridor, and it was at like 2 a.m.,” he said, assuming it must be a few of the staff working in the recording studio down the hall. When he spoke to them in the morning, their reply was: “Oh, so you heard them.”
