STRANGER THINGS
SCHOOL’S OUT IN STRANGER THINGS 3… RICHARD EDWARDS HEADS DOWN TO HAWKINS’ NEW MALL TO FIND OUT HOW THE 1985-SET SEASON IS SHAPING UP
Bust out a can of New Coke with Shawn Levy and the stars as we head back to Hawkins for another serving of Spielbergian thrills and slimey-viney weirdness.
IT’S ONE OF THOSE INDISPUTABLE FACTS of life that summers when you were a kid were way better than they are now. Halcyon days when you had no worries about getting up for school or work in the morning, those endless evenings with nothing more pressing to do than hang out with your mates, talking about absolutely nothing – nobody would have dreamed of complaining about the weather being too hot. And if you grew up in the States you can probably ratchet up that nostalgia factor by a few notches, seeing as those summer months are unlikely to have been ruined by quite so many mediocre “rainy day” activities.
So for Stranger Things, a precisionengineered nostalgia delivery mechanism in the form of an ’80s-set sci-fi drama, the fact that the upcoming third
season is leaving the show’s traditional autumnal haunts behind to bring summer to Hawkins, Indiana, should see the deification of the good old days turned up to, well, Eleven. “We always knew we wanted to set season three in the summer,” says Stranger Things executive producer and occasional director Shawn Levy, gamely talking to SFX on the phone as he boards a flight. “We wanted the fun and the kind of unique freedom that summers in the mid-’80s seemed to have. [This setting] brings the freedom that comes from not being in school, and that means summer camps, cookouts, barbecues and the swimming pool. It’s just a different ethos, and it allows season three to really start from a fairly fun, light-hearted place before it eventually devolves into far darker plotlines and threats.”
TIME AFTER TIME
Last time we left Hawkins it was late 1984 and things were more-or-less back to normal – or as normal as things get in a small American town where a top-secret government lab sits on top of a gateway that allows killer creatures from the nightmare world of the Upside Down to crossover into ours.
The telekinetic Eleven had returned from the big city and the interdimensional rift had seemingly been closed, with a surprisingly small number of Hawkins residents on the casualty list – just Sean Astin’s heroic Bob joined Barb on the “those we have lost” roster. That meant the kids were free to go to their school’s annual Snow Ball, blissfully unaware of the giant Mind Flayer lurking over them in the Upside Down…
Stranger Things 3 fast-forwards to July 1985, where things are remarkably quiet – so quiet,
Season three explores the conflict that arises when the rate of change and growth differs between characters
in fact, that you can’t help feeling this is going to be the most explosive American Independence Day since Will Smith whupped E.T.’s ass.
“There’s definitely been developments in the interim but I think they’re more earthbound than supernatural,” explains Levy. “You get to see the supernatural plot in season three evolve on camera. What has happened off camera is the development of Hopper and Eleven’s relationship, the development of the romantic relationship between Mike and Eleven that we saw begin at the Snow Ball, the romantic storyline between Max and Lucas… those things have continued to evolve off-screen since season two, and part of what season three explores is the conflict that arises when the rate of change and growth differs between characters.”
Indeed, in Stranger Things season three, the group of wannabe Goonies who have survived numerous encounters with the Upside Down may just find the biggest threat to keeping their gang together isn’t so much Demogorgons as puberty. While some of the group will still be happy playing Dungeons & Dragons, others will start to feel they’ve left kids’ stuff like that behind them.
“That’s very much our story in season three,” explains Levy. “our tagline is that ‘one summer can change everything’, but the reality is that growing up doesn’t happen at a constant or consistent speed. people develop in very different ways and at different rates.”
not least because Hawkins time runs significantly slower than time in the real world
In season three we have a lot of fun with Eleven’s intersection with the real world and other characters
– in the three years since Stranger Things first aired in July 2016, a mere 20 months will have passed in Indiana. The discrepancy hasn’t gone unnoticed by Levy, who believes the show’s creative team can’t really do much about it without compromising the quality of the show.
“probably once a week we say to ourselves we really should work faster,” he laughs. “Then within moments we realise, ‘oh wait, we’re working at the speed we can work at.’ We don’t know how to work faster and keep it as great because the show really reflects the voice of the Duffers [Matt and Ross, the twin brothers who created Stranger Things], and they work at a certain speed. However much we resolve to work more quickly, it takes what it takes to do it right, so because we’re not really able to change the pace it’s another reason why we simply embrace the evolution of our actors – we don’t have an option.
“But the Harry Potter film franchise didn’t try to freeze time,” he adds. “They acknowledged the passage of time and they let the story service the developing ages and identities of their actors. That’s very much been our model, we haven’t put on the brakes or the blinders on the evolution of these young actors. We’ve built stories to exploit their evolving selves.”
FAMILY TIES
no character has evolved more than Eleven, the psychic kid with a susceptibility to nosebleeds who became an icon as soon as
Stranger Things first dropped on netflix. By the start of season three the former lab rat has started integrating into society, picked up a forged birth certificate, and found, in chief Hopper, a new adoptive dad who’s rather more palatable than Dr Brenner, the government scientist who raised her as an experiment. not that the father/daughter relationship is going to be plain sailing.
“I would say that Hopper deals with having a teenage surrogate daughter comedically horribly!” Levy laughs. “It’s extremely fun because we’re not only getting to see Eleven evolve into more of a normal young teenager, but we’re also kind of putting her into the world in a way that her character hasn’t been allowed to before. The wide-eyed innocence and wonder of a girl who was raised in a lab, seeing her in a mall, seeing her in a friendship with another teenage girl… these were really juicy opportunities in the storytelling to show colours and aspects of this character that people love, and yet don’t really fully know. Season three lets you get to know Eleven and her various sides in a more thorough way.”
And after season two conspired to keep Eleven away from the other kids for almost the whole of its run – a creative decision criticised by many who missed the fun chemistry of season one – they’ll very much be hanging out again in the new season.
“I think that we did a good job [in season two] at bringing everyone together by the finale episodes as we tend to do,” Levy counters. “But yes, I would say that for season three we wanted to explore Eleven without siloing her. In season two she was in that Hopper cabin storyline, but in season three she’s not isolated in a narrative silo in quite the same way. We’re able to have a lot of fun with her intersection with the real world and many other characters.”
The emphasis there should probably be on “many”, as Hawkins’ on-screen population has grown to – if not quite the scale of Game Of
Thrones – the proportions of a sizeable generation-spanning ensemble. Beyond lead kids Eleven, Mike, Dustin, Lucas, Will and Max, there’s older teens like nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers and fan fave Steve Harrington, and then the grown-ups represented by chief Hopper and Joyce Byers (played by actual ’80s icon Winona Ryder). Beyond the core cast, bit-part players will see their roles expanded: Mike and nancy’s mum Karen looks set to indulge in some aggressive flirting with mullet-with-attitude Billy Hargrove, while Lucas’s little sister Erica gets a promotion having impressed during her minimal screentime in season two.
“Every time we film a scene, we’re looking at the potential of each performer and the ways that we perhaps haven’t tapped into them fully,” says Levy. “The Duffers adjust the story to exploit the talents of our actors. priah Ferguson has, like, three lines as Lucas’s sister
in season two, and here she is very much in the centre and a huge part of this plotline. We’ll always embrace the strengths of our performers and write and direct the show around those building blocks.
“It’s really, really important to service all our characters,” he adds, “but there’s no question that it gets harder and harder. Like any show where there’s a lot of series regulars who are beloved, it’s almost impossible to service them equally. But hopefully we’re succeeding in our commitment to servicing them in terms of substance – maybe not always in terms of screentime, but in terms of meaningful moments that are true to their characters.”
And it wouldn’t be Stranger Things without reinventing an ’80s icon as a Hawkins resident, and this year it’s cary Elwes’s turn to follow in the footsteps of Matthew Modine, Sean Astin and paul Reiser, playing the town’s previously unseen “image conscious” Mayor Kline. “For us, cary will always be Westley from
The Princess Bride, he’s such an iconic performer from an ’80s classic,” Levy admits. “But he also frankly is just perfect for the part. So much like Sean Astin, the ’80s identifier is fun but he got the part because he’s perfect in the part.”
MALL RATS
With school out for summer, there’s a hot new location to be seen in Hawkins – a place that would have felt like some unobtainable promised land to British kids who’d have been happy sitting in a bus shelter with few cans of White Lightning, but echoes a quintessential part of US teen movies: Starcourt Mall.
“Mall culture is a classic ’80s development,” explains Levy. “Malls kind of became the central meeting hub of social life, especially for teenagers, and we wanted to reflect that. It’s
also a bit of a commentary on the way things evolved in small-town America, where Main Street was replaced with the central hub of the mall. It serves as a gathering space, and in a season that isn’t during the school year, we needed a unifying nexus for characters to come together and interact and go through experiences. The mall becomes that kind of de facto centre.”
And for the Duffers, who’ve managed to build a successful career out of their encyclopaedic knowledge of ’80s VHS collections, it’s an excuse to expand their pop culture touchstones beyond the Steven Spielberg/Stephen King axis that has traditionally been the focus of the show.
“John Hughes was a big influence,” Levy admits, “and that mixture of levity, poignance and coming-of-age stories was very much a part of what we were going for in season three.
Back To The Future plays a significant role in this season as well, because it came out in the summer of ’85, and it just makes sense in the way that Ghostbusters made sense in season two. And then there’s always the genre influences, whether it’s shades of cronenberg, shades of Bodysnatchers, shades of horror… These were all formative influences on us and most notably on the Duffers. Stranger Things is unique in the way it combines these influences and somehow does so in a way that makes for something original and fresh.”
Levy believes that season three also ups the comedy.
“It’s interesting because when we started off season one the Duffers didn’t think of themselves at all as comedy writers,” he says. “And yet I think that with every season we have more and more levity. Season three, especially in its early episodes, has quite a healthy dose of very enjoyable comedic storylines. That’s not to say that it’s a fluffy or lightweight season but it certainly has more comedy than we’ve ever been afforded. That makes the turn to darkness feel that much more shocking.”
SHORTER THINGS
More shocking and more concentrated, because Stranger Things 3 is shorter than its predecessor – after nine episodes in season two, the new run returns to the eight-part format of the show’s first year. It was, says Levy, a purely creative decision. “netflix amazingly let the content dictate the episodes, so the narrative felt like it fit eight episodes,” he explains. “But I don’t think I’m speaking out of school when I tell you season three contains several of our longest episodes by a big margin.” But he’s rather more tight-lipped when it comes to how many years Stranger Things will go on. While it’s
This season has more comedy than before – that makes the turn to darkness feel that much more shocking
pretty much certain that season three won’t be the last, the question of whether we’ll get one or two more years after that is up for debate.
“Those conversations are very much ongoing,” teases Levy. “I think all we’ve sealed is that we anticipate a fourth for sure. As far as the life of our show beyond that goes I’ll simply tell you that we don’t have complete clarity and certainty yet. But the Duffers and I, along with our cast, adore this show and telling these stories, and it’s not like anyone is looking to be done with it in the very near future. We make
Stranger Things with love, and the fact that it’s been embraced in the way that it has is something we never take for granted. I’ll just say stay tuned on that front.”
So there’s no grand plan, the framework of an epic they simply have to tell? Levy says not. “I think because the Duffers came to
Stranger Things pretty inexperienced, and certainly inexperienced in TV, we don’t really follow some overarching road map. Every year we end up exploring things that interest us in that moment, and that means that we don’t plan everything – in fact some of our greatest discoveries just come about mid-season. I think the greatest example of that is realising in the middle of making season two that Steve Harrington could be comedic and enjoyable, and a babysitter, if you will, to Dustin. With discoveries and storylines like that along the way, we’re willing to bet on those subliminal instincts because some of the greatest stories that we’ve been able to tell come about on the sly, and in unexpected ways.”
Stranger Things 3 streams on Netflix from 4 July.