Netflix, on Friday, announced new cast members for Stranger Things Season 4. Robert Englund, the erstwhile Freddy Kreuger from The Nightmare on Elm Street, is joining the show along with Jamie Campbell Bower (Twilight) and Tom Wlaschiha (Game of Thrones).
The announcements were made with the cast photos upside-down, which could potentially mean that Season 4 may delve deeper into the world of Upside Down, which is an alternate dimension inhospitable to humans and full of dangerous creatures such as the Demogorgon which featured in Season 1. Stranger Things creators are yet to delve into the origins of this alternate dimension.
Robert Englund aka Victor Creel is a disturbed and intimidating man who is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s. pic.twitter.com/QsuaGTVqDf
— Stranger Things (@Stranger_Things) November 20, 2020
The Stranger Things team described Englund’s character as “Victor Creel, a disturbed and intimidating man who is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s.”
Bower, who also played the younger Gellert Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts franchise, will play Peter Ballard, “a caring man who works as an orderly at a psychiatric hospital.”
Other characters include Eduardo Franco (Booksmart) as Argyle, a fun-loving stoner who works at Surfer Boy Pizza, Joseph Quinn Catherine the Great fame as Eddie Munson, a metalhead who runs the local Dungeons & Dragons club, the Hellfire Club.
Tom Wlaschiha aka Dmitri, a smart and charming Russian prison guard. But can he be trusted? pic.twitter.com/oony5ss28t
— Stranger Things (@Stranger_Things) November 20, 2020
Wlaschiha will be seen as Dimitri, a “smart and charming Russian prison guard.” Nikola Djuricko will play Yuri, “a seedy and unpredictable Russian smuggler who loves bad jokes, cold hard cash, and crunchy style peanut butter.”
Mason Dye will play Jason Carver, “a handsome, rich athlete who is dating the most popular girl in school.” And finally, Sherman Augustus play Lt. Colonel Sullivan. He is described as “an intelligent, no-nonsense man who believes he knows how to stop the evil in Hawkins once and for all.”
Shooting for the 4th installment began in October, after a delayed start due to the ongoing pandemic.
Stranger Things was created by the Duffer brothers (Ross and Matt) and is produced by Monkey Massacre Productions & 21 Laps Entertainment. It is set in 1983 Indiana, where, in the first season, a young boy vanishes into thin air. When friends and family start looking for him, they uncover uncomfortable truths about top-secret government experiments, terrifying supernatural forces, and one little girl.
The newest additions in the cast come after at the end of Season 3, where the main characters emerge successful in setting off an explosion to close the gate to Upside Down by destroying the Soviet lab. While Billy (Dacre Montogomery) sacrifices himself in order to defeat the Mind Flayer, Jim Hopper (David Harbour) is also seen sacrificing himself in order to close the Russian gate. The episode ends with Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) taking her sons (Charlie Heaton, Noah Schnapp) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) out of the Indiana town to start a new life whereas USSR guards are seen feeding a prisoner to an imprisoned Demogorgon.
With the cast descriptions, it seems Season 4 could delve deeper into the Russian involvement as well school-life post the death of Billy’s character. The psychiatric hospital mentioned in the announcements could also be a potential main location for the newest season.
Netflix had recently released a teaser showing that the character Hopper (David Harbour) was alive and a prisoner in the Soviet Union.
The show stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour, Finn Wolfhard, Millie Bobby Brown, Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, Sadie Sink, Natalia Dyer, Charlie Heaton, Joe Keery, Cara Buono, and Dacre Montgomery.
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Ever since Stranger Things released, there have been speculations about the show being somewhat based on true events. Screenrant had earlier reported that the Duffer brothers took inspiration for the show from an actual United States government project called MK-Ultra for the storyline of Season 1, in which we glimpse experiments being performed on Brown’s character Eleven.
In real life, details of the MK-Ultra project were revealed in declassified CIA documents which stated that the project was created by the CIA in 1953 with the aim of developing mind-control techniques that could give America an advantage against Russia in the Cold War.