How does an actor know that he has become a pop culture icon? Oscars can help, but are not mandatory. A more obvious sign is when people start repeating her lines from films (“You talking to me?”, “Hasta la vista, baby”) or dressing after her example (timeless: Hepburn’s little black dress, passé: Woody Allen’s glasses). It should also be a clear signal if you open a surprise egg and the toy figure you find inside represents you.
At least we tried to give such moments to the young actors of the American hit series “Stranger Things”. We took four Kinder Joy eggs with us for an interview at a luxury hotel in Berlin; Among many other things, “Stranger Things” is known for aggressive product placement, which is what we want to do here. We’re going to take those two eggs home again because Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin) and Finn Wolfhard (Mike) aren’t there; In the morning we received a call that the actors, who were completing a world tour before the start of the fifth and final season of the series, were at the end of their tether and their interview appearances would be made more sparingly.
“Lucas” Caleb McLaughlin, 24, and “Will” Noah Schnapp, 21, greeted us this morning. The scheduled time is only 15 minutes; Journalists not only from Germany, but from all over Europe and Africa are expected to attend today, in person at the hotel or via video link.
Brother listen
Even on a media day like this, the big engine that drives the hugely important project “Stranger Things” is revealed. The interview room resembled a studio, the cameraman was waiting behind us to deploy, far behind were about a dozen people with laptops and functions we didn’t know about, and across from us, about two meters away, were Schnapp and McLaughlin. Also in the room, although out of sight, is its big brother: Netflix is listening so it can intervene if there’s a spoiler alert. So when someone raves about the plot of a new episode. The fifth season will appear on Netflix in parts: four episodes on November 27, three episodes on Boxing Day, and the final episode – according to our time zone – on New Year’s morning at two o’clock. Many New Year’s Eve parties are likely to end abruptly.
Just how important “Stranger Things,” created by twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, is to Netflix can be seen from the fact that new seasons tend to hit viewership records – and at the same time be kind to enthusiastic reviews. The series connects genres and generations: A mix of mystery, horror, and coming-of-age story set in the 1980s and evoking the nostalgia of then-young people, as well as the curiosity of today’s youth about a legendary decade where music was poppier, fashion was more muted, and in general things might have been better (spoiler: if you knew). “Stranger Things” has brought back an eighties phenomenon: BMX bikes. Mullet hairstyle. Winona Ryder. “Generation Z now feels connected to the world,” said Caleb McLaughlin.
You could say that “Stranger Things” is to streaming television what “Harry Potter” is to cinema – because of the hype, but also because the world can watch young actors grow here and there. Caleb McLaughlin, the oldest of the group of four, was 14 when the first season was filmed in 2015, Noah Schnapp was eleven, as was Millie Bobby Brown, who was perhaps the series’ biggest star as Eleven. Today, at 21, Brown is married, adopted a child, and lives in the country with his family — a very unique and consistent way to escape the “Stranger Things” hype.
“We are all nerds”
But back to the interview room, to Schnapp and McLaughlin. Despite a slight worry of being overwhelmed by security guards trying to avoid poison attacks on the young stars, we gave them each a Kinder Joy Egg with a hint that they might find a picture of themselves: 24 figures and gadgets from the “Stranger Things” universe is the current gimmick there. Schnapp routinely opens her eggs and declares: “I have Nancy.” (That would really be a huge coincidence.) To McLaughlin, the egg looked like a foreign object. “I have – food,” he exclaimed in amazement and held half of it with milk cream and crunchy balls. In the other half, where he finally found his toys, there was something to assemble.
Similar to the 1986 classic “Stand by Me” and many other teen epics, “Stranger Things” tells the story of a group of wacky, nerdy friends who use their special interests and talents to defeat evil, such as slimy monsters called Demogorgons (the jocks are often less fortunate). As movie stars, aren’t the actors themselves more in the camp? cool kids set? “No, we’re all nerds,” Schnapp said. McLaughlin repeated: “Actors are nerds! Kids who like theater and movies aren’t cool. They can pretend to be cool, but they’re not.”
Early fame has been detrimental to many young stars. It must be said that no one from the cast of “Stranger Things” has gone off the rails yet. “Having each other really helped us stabilize our childhood,” Noah Schnapp said. “Even on set, we were taught together, and it felt like a normal classroom with a group of kids and a teacher who was trying to tame them.” – “We also rested and played football outside,” McLaughlin recalled, and Schnapp added: “And we did what we did in the afternoon: shooting.” Schnapp said he wouldn’t trade those years of experience for anything. What he won’t miss, however, is “the pressure that comes with this series. So many eyes are watching it, and every season, it gets bigger and bigger.”
Everything keeps getting bigger
Too big: This also applies to the series itself, whose episodes are getting longer and longer and, despite more effort, seem to be telling the same thing over and over again. But also for the actors: Can McLaughlin still empathize with 16-year-old Lucas, whom he last played when he was 23? “Yes, because I myself was 16 years old,” he said. Schnapp talked about the moment when he thought, “Oh, I’ve outgrown this role a little bit.” However, it never feels too uncomfortable, “except maybe a little in season three.”
The Berlin fan event for the series also showed great effort. In just two days, Netflix has created a theme park around the fictional small town of Hawkins in Hangar 7 at Tempelhof Airport, where visitors can bike through a forest full of Demogorgons, eat the series’ famous “Surfer Boy” pizza, and take a music quiz to find out that Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” – which is back on the charts thanks to “Stranger Things” – hardly sounds different when played backwards. Finally, the four actors who travel to Berlin can enjoy mountains of Kinder Joy Eggs and are guaranteed to find themselves in the process. But they only appear briefly at night; At some point it all becomes too much.
They believe they will remain a community. Jennifer Aniston, says Noah Schnapp, once said that when she and her “Friends” co-stars met each other at an event, they immediately ignored the outside world and talked to each other all night. “I think the same thing will happen to us for the rest of our careers,” he said. “We will always be connected to our Stranger Things childhood.”
