Stranger Things releases season five behind-the-scenes teaser video, reveals three new cast

The folks over at Stranger Things knows they’re making you wait a long time between episodes so they have to keep you on the hook in the in-between times.

The final season is expected to land in 2025, so depending on which month, it will be at least two-and-a-half years and up to three-and-a-half years between series four and five.

They are now halfway through production on its monster final episodes and, to commemorate the occasion, and remind you Stranger Things still exists, the show has released a behind-the-scenes video of what to expect.

Apparently, according to Noah Schnapp who plays Will Byers, it will be “the best season yet” while Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays the villainous Vecna, promised, “season four was big, season five definitely feels bigger”.

But they would say that, right?

The two-minute video is a montage of peeks and clips of the production in action – clapboards, craftspeople smearing fake blood on set, the Duffer brothers seated at a monitor watching filming, glimpses of the stages including a not-destroyed Hawkins High, and various actors taking stock and looking back.

Such as when Millie Bobby Brown drives herself to work that she was 10 when she started making the show and now she’s about to be 20. Do you feel old yet?

There are four new faces in Hawkins, Indiana, the fictional town at the nexus of all the supernatural drama in the series, including Terminator icon Linda Hamilton, whose involvement was previously announced.

The other three are Alex Breaux, and child actors Nell Fisher and Jake Connelly.

Breaux is a journeyman actor who has appeared in a bunch of shorts or as a guest star on the likes of Law & Order: SVU, Blue Bloods and as American terrorist Timothy McVeigh in Waco: The Aftermath.

Fisher is a British actor who has appeared in two episodes of Australian-Kiwi series My Life is Murder and kids film Bookworm. Stranger Things is Connelly’s first role.

Stranger Things has a history of elevating unknown child actors into the stratosphere. When the show premiered in 2016, its core cast of the younger crew including Brown, Schnapp, Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin were all relative newcomers.

Since then, the series has also made stars out of Sadie Sink, Joe Keery and Joe Quinn, who played the breakout character of Eddie Munson in season four. After Stranger Things, Quinn booked roles in A Quiet Place: Day One and Gladiator II.

Earlier this month, the Duffer brothers, who created the series and serve as showrunners, marked the official halfway point of production, which was already 24 weeks in. Filming is expected to wrap in December.

Rare is the TV or streaming season that needs a year to shoot everything, so the fifth season is shaping up to be a mammoth. Two weeks ago, cast member Maya Hawke told Podcrushed that all eight episodes will feel like “eight movies” and said the runtime for each is “very long”.

“They write a lot and they are very intense and serious about the quality of the continued writing, and so it takes a long time to write each season, and a long time to shoot them,” Hawke said.

Every episode of the previous season ran for over an hour, ranging from one hour and three minutes to one hour and 38 minutes. A film is typically between one hour and 20 minutes and three hours.

In 2022, the Duffer brothers said they didn’t expect the fifth season’s instalments to be as extended as the fourth’s. However, they flagged the finale was going to be a blockbuster. Matt Duffer joked, “I’m sure the wrap-up will be a lot longer, it’s going to be Return of the King-ish, with like eight endings!”

The pair previously revealed the first episode of season five will be titled “The Crawl”.