Entertainment Weekly Special Collection

The best kinds of pop culture phenomena are the ones that catch everyone by surprise. In July 2016 the first eight Stranger Things episodes were released on Netflix with very little hype. The highest-profile actors in the ensemble cast were Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine. The show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, had directed one little-seen indie horror film, 2015’s Hidden, and they’d written a few episodes of the short-lived science-fiction mystery series Wayward Pines. Even the most devoted movie and TV buffs didn’t really know the Duffer brothers. Nothing about Stranger Things screamed “hit.” Yet in the heat of an anxious election-year summer, Netflix subscribers embraced this series. Stranger Things offered something people seemed to need at the time: an escape back to an Indiana small town in 1983 and…

MATT AND ROSS DUFFER, THE creators, writers and often directors of the Emmy Award-winning Stranger Things, have spent seven years making comparisons between their otherwise wholly original, alternately tender and terrifying show and iconic films, such as Harry Potter, Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. For season 4 they’ve added another reference: “We jokingly call it our Game of Thrones season,” says Matt. As volume 2 prepares to drop on July 1, there is no arguing the season’s epic scope—from the number of episodes to their run time. Episode 7 flirts with two hours; episodes 8 and 9 are planned for about an hour and a half and two and a half hours, respectively. Then there are the three distinct story lines and locations. While the interwoven plots and geographically…

Matt and Ross Duffer have been creative collaborators since childhood. They come up with their ideas together, listen to the same music and often complete each other’s sentences. Equally key to their seamless partnership: agreeing on the importance of a walk and a bouncy ball. What was the inspiration for Stranger Things? Ross Duffer The exact moment might be surprising, but there’s this Denis Villeneuve film called Prisoners, with Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman. We loved it and were excited by the idea, but we wanted to spend more time with the characters. We said, “What if we did a longer-form kidnapping story, but there’s a child and a monster in it as well?” Matt Duffer It was an old idea we had with a government conspiracy and a monster. We were super…

IN 2015 A CASTING CALL WENT out for five child actors, around the age of 12, to star in a new series for Netflix. Set in Hawkins, Ind., during the 1980s, it would be reminiscent of Stephen King’s sweet coming-of-age story Stand by Me—assuming the preteens found themselves coming of age in another of King’s tales, the terrifying It. The requirements: four boys who would form a band of misfit friends and one girl who would be willing to shave her head. “We weren’t thinking of them as kids or teen actors,” casting director Carmen Cuba recalled of the search. Instead, the show’s creators, twin brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, “were really expecting them to deliver a very rich human experience despite what age … they were.” Four seasons and seven…

EXCLUSIVE Q+A INTERVIEWS Joyce Byers WINONA RYDER Despite the escalating drama, things may be getting relatively easier for Joyce Byers—which makes Winona Ryder’s work considerably less taxing. In the first season the actress was required to cry so much after Joyce’s son Will goes missing that she had to drink copious amounts of water to avoid becoming dehydrated. In season 4, Joyce still has her stressors: She’s got one seriously moody teenager on her hands; she’s chasing Hopper down in Russia; and the Upside Down is rising again. But at least no one thinks she’s crazy anymore. This is the first season Joyce has left home. How was it? Ryder It was very different for me because I’m usually with the kids or with Hopper. This season we were filming in Lithuania, and I had…

Nancy Wheeler NATALIA DYER Nancy Wheeler might simply have been the stereotypical “good girl,” the kind of young woman whose perfect manners and straight As make mothers wish their daughters could be more like her, and daughters rue that such people exist for comparison. Yet as audiences know well, nothing is ever simple on Stranger Things. All it took was a monster killing her best friend, Barb, for this overachiever to lend her brilliant brain to the battle and earn the nickname Nancy Drew in the process. When Dyer first read the part, she immediately felt a kinship. “I do think she reflected me in high school in some ways,” she says. “I was studious and quiet and played by the rules.” Then came the sudden fame attached to a surprise hit show,…