Copyright independent
The Duffer brothers have shared that they had to “block” the producers of the Stranger Things Broadway production because it gave away some plots from the forthcoming fifth and final season of the hit Netflix series. Stranger Things is set in the 1980s in the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, and follows the town’s residents after a young girl with psychokinetic abilities opens a gateway between Earth and an alternate dimension known as the Upside Down. In a new interview a month before the release of the highly-awaited season, show creators Matt and Ross Duffer talked about how the play, a prequel to the events of the series, ties into the origin story that will be explored in the fifth season. “We really dive into Henry's backstory before he arrived at Hawkins lab. We definitely explore more about Henry because so much of the show does revolve around Vecna and his relationship with Will,” Matt Duffer told Entertainment Weekly. “In this season, we go back even prior to that, and so the Broadway show sort of becomes this little connective tissue between the seasons itself,” added Ross Duffer. "Actually we had to block the Broadway show producers a lot from putting in too much material that we were gonna have in season 5 because we did not want it to be too spoilery," Matt said. Henry Creel, later revealed to be Vecna, is the science fiction series’ central antagonist, a powerful being who started out as a human before becoming the monstrous force behind the Upside Down. Will Byers, played by Noah Schnapp, whose disappearance in the first season opened the gateway between worlds, and his connection to Vecna, played by Jamie Campbell Bower, has been the series’ most mysterious threads. Produced by Netflix and Sonia Friedman Productions, Stranger Things: The First Shadow features an ensemble of 34 actors in a stand-alone story from Kate Trefry, rooted in the world of the hit Netflix series. Following its successful ongoing run in London’s West End, where it recently won two Olivier Awards for Best Entertainment and Best Set Design, the production officially opened on 22 April on Broadway. The play takes place in Hawkins in 1959, where the Creel family seeks a fresh start for their teenage son, Henry, who longs to escape his troubled past. “But when a wave of shocking crimes strikes the town, Henry is forced to confront a terrifying truth: is something inside him that connects him to the horrors unfolding around him?” an official logline reads. Matt added that they needed to work with the producers from including too much of Henry’s past in the play, because it would overlap with the series’ plots. “Actually we had to block the Broadway show producers a lot from putting in too much material that we were gonna have in season 5 because we did not want it to be too spoilery,” he said. The Duffer Brothers teased last month that the final season will include “one of the biggest, craziest episodes that we’ve ever done.” “The thing we’re really excited about with this season is that, really from the very beginning of it, our characters are active,” Ross Duffer said at the Variety Entertainment & Technology Summit in Los Angeles. “This isn’t going about normal life and then something supernatural happens to them, which is what we usually do. They have to solve this mystery. This is them active, which is exciting. They're going [into] ‘on a mission mode’ in episode one, which is great.” “Those first four episodes, which release on Thanksgiving, are really building to one of the biggest, craziest episodes that we've ever done.” The fourth season, which was released in 2022, held the spot for the second most-watched English-language TV series on Netflix at 140.7 million views until June this year, when it was surpassed by the Emmy-winning UK miniseries Adolescence, with 141.2 million total views. Stranger Things 5 Volume one, comprising four episodes, will be released on 26 November. Volume two will then be released on Christmas Day and contains the next three episodes. The finale, which is titled “The Rightside Up”, will then be shared on the platform on New Year’s Eve.
