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Credit: Netflix
Do you remember where you were the day Stranger Things debuted on Netflix? Sure, it’s nowhere near as universally important an incident as JFK’s assassination or the moon landing, but it could eventually become as important a TV premiere as I Love Lucy orLost (or Finn Wolfhard’s go-to comparison Game of Thrones). Of course, that depends on how well its fifth and final season is received by audiences around the world, and whether or not it quells concerns that the actors have gotten too old.
With the new episodes finally set to arrive starting on Thanksgiving, the cast and creators have been quite busy with promoting the horror/sci-fi juggernaut for the last time, more than nine years after the first season introduced audiences to Hawkins, the Wheelers and the Byers (among others). For an expansive profile for Time, co-star Millie Bobby Brown moderated a Q&A with other cast members that tapped into how much the actors have out-aged their characters.
When posed a question about the biggest differences the stars could pick out between Season 1 and Season 5, Finn Wolfhard offered this gem that had Brown giggling:
FINN WOLFHARD: Hung out. We got along. We went to bars. We went to bars together.
NOAH SCHNAPP: Yeah, there was less drama.
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It boggles the mind that Mike, Will, Dustin, Lucas and Eleven were even in the vicinity of being old enough to go to bars together while still playing the same high school students for nearly a decade. It’d be like seeing Big Bird at a bar after 50 years of watching him as a 6-year-old. Okay, maybe that’s not quite right, but close enough.
Speaking to the idea that the cast members hanging out together wasn’t always the case, others chimed in to say:
MILLIE BOBBY BROWN: I would agree, I think our age…
GATEN MATARAZZO: The lack of school in the last two seasons.
NOAH SCHNAPP: School pit us against each other, and without school, we were all best friends.
Nobody fully addressed why the behind-the-scenes schooling was so rough on their intrapersonal relationships, but they wouldn’t be the first group of teens who found an on-set education to be more stressful than traditional means. Gaten Matazzara voiced that he can still feel the heart rush and stress that came from that time, and wasn’t exactly excited about it sticking around.
That’s another gobsmacking realization to bring up, of course: the Stranger Things kids are all out of high school, and some have been for years. It’s an even bigger brain-buster when one considers that the core squad of D&D-loving characters won’t even be seniors at Hawkins High when the show returns. (That age gap is visibly obvious when watching the adult-leaning actors still riding kids’ bikes.)
In fact, it’s been so long since Millie Bobby Brown has experienced schooling on Stranger Things‘ set that she’s actually nostalgic for it. As she put it:
I would also say that, school, I did kind of miss it. In the breaks, you have no reason [to do anything] but just, like, hang out. But before, we would all go to school and have to sit and count our time. I dunno, there’s something very nostalgic about it. At the time, I hated it, but now…
I’m hoping it will be easy for audiences to fall right back into the show’s clutches without thinking about the de-aging techniques, and that the dispelled rumors about massive episode runtimes don’t actually turn out to be true. If we’re already gonna spend most of 2025’s last month bitching about Will’s dumb haircut and Max being in a coma for half of the season, I really don’t want to also have feature-length episodes in the mix.
Stranger Things will debut its final season’s first four episodes via Netflix subscription on Thursday, November 27, 2025, with later episodes dropping on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve.
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