How to Get Cast on ‘Stranger Things’

Matt and Ross Duffer, aka the Duffer brothers, created “Stranger Things.” They also serve as executive producers and showrunners. The series began filming in November 2015 in and around Atlanta, premiering on Netflix on July 15, 2016. (Spoilers ahead!) 

Set in the early ’80s, Season 1 of “Stranger Things” introduces viewers to a terrifying alternate dimension called the Upside Down. Thanks to the Hawkins National Laboratory’s secret supernatural experiments, a portal to the Upside Down opens, allowing a paranormal creature called the Demogorgon to abduct 12-year-old Will Byers (Schnapp). The story focuses on Will’s friends and family, including Will’s mother, Joyce (Winona Ryder), and their search to save him with the help of Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), a psychokinetic girl who escaped the lab. Season 2 introduces the Mind Flayer, a giant, spider-like monster from the Upside Down that has managed to possess Will. Once again, the kids must work together to close the gate—this time, with the help of a new addition, Max Mayfield (Sadie Sink).

Season 3 picks up a year later and revolves around the opening of the new Starcourt Mall, which serves as a secret base for a Soviet lab that’s trying to reopen the gateway to the Upside Down. The Mind Flayer is once again possessing the citizens of Hawkins, most notably Max’s abusive stepbrother, Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery). Eleven eventually defeats the monster, but Hawkins sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour) must sacrifice himself to shut down the Russian machine that’s keeping the portal open—or so it seems.

Season 4 follows three plotlines and is broken into two parts. While the kids in Hawkins find themselves tasked with solving the mysterious murders of teens in their community, another group who has moved to California are on the hunt for Eleven as she attempts to regain her powers. Meanwhile, locked away in a Russian prison, Hopper finds himself at the mercy of another Demogorgon. But will everyone make it out alive? That’s what Season 5 will ultimately reveal as the kids band together one more time to kill Season 4’s villain, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) and save Hawkins from more deadly threats.

In its first three seasons, “Stranger Things” starred:

• Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven
• Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers
• David Harbour as Jim Hopper
• Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler
• Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson
• Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair
• Noah Schnapp as Will Byers
• Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler
• Charlie Heaton as Jonathan Byers
• Joe Keery as Steve Harrington
• Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield
• Cara Buono as Karen Wheeler
• Matthew Modine as Martin Brenner
• Paul Reiser as Sam Owens
• Priah Ferguson as Erica Sinclair
• Dacre Montgomery as Billy Hargrove
• Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley
• Brett Gelman as Murray Bauman

Season 4 saw the addition of numerous new regular and recurring cast members, including:

• Jamie Campbell Bower as Friendly Orderly
• Eduardo Franco as Argyle
• Joseph Quinn as Eddie Munson
• Robert Englund as Victor Creel
• Tom Wlaschiha as Dmitri Antonov
• Sherman Augustus as Lieutenant Colonel Jack Sullivan
• Mason Dye as Jason Carver
• Nikola Djuricko as Yuri
• Amybeth McNulty as Vickie
• Myles Truitt as Patrick McKinney
• Regina Ting Chen as Counselor Kelley
• Grace Van Dien as Chrissy Cunningham

As for Season 5, “Terminator” star Linda Hamilton joined the cast as Dr. Kay—a character who’s been shrouded in mystery since news of Hamilton’s involvement was announced. “I Zoomed [creators] Ross and Matt Duffer, and they gave me the shape of the character, but not of the story. Because they have to be very careful with their story. So I still don’t know how it ends,” Hamilton told Us Weekly in 2024.

In addition to Hamilton, Nell Fisher, Jake Connelly, and Alex Breaux also joined Season 5’s cast.

As for Season 5, “Terminator” star Linda Hamilton is joining the cast, but details about her role are being kept under wraps, according to Us Weekly.

“I Zoomed [creators] Ross and Matt Duffer, and they gave me the shape of the character, but not of the story. Because they have to be very careful with their story. So I still don’t know how it ends,” Hamilton told the outlet.

In addition to Hamilton, Nell Fisher, Jake Connelly, and Alex Breaux are also joining Season 5’s cast. 

Carmen Cuba was the casting director for the series. Based in Los Angeles, Cuba has worked on series and films, including “Devs,” “Mrs. America,” “Vida,” “The Florida Project,” “Looking,” “The Martian,” and “Magic Mike.”

When it came time to cast “Stranger Things,” Matt Duffer said, “Everyone recognized really early on that if we had even one kid who wasn’t good, it would take the whole ship down. So we just started looking really, really early on. At that point, we just had the pilot script, and we had so little material that we were actually having them audition with scenes from ‘Stand By Me.’ ” Ultimately, they “found four kids that we just fell in love with. Some of them matched the characters in the script, and some of them didn’t, really.”

As for the adult leads, executive producer Shawn Levy said, “We never really operated with respect for conventional rules…. Winona Ryder was not getting offered a lot of jobs [in 2015]. David Harbour was getting offered jobs, but they tended to be number seven to 12 on the call sheet. We saw David’s audition, we sat for four hours having tea with Winona, and we came away from those interactions with certainty that we’d found our Hopper and our Joyce. We just knew what our characters felt like when we sat across the table from those actors, and we wanted to take that shot. My point is: The greatest idea in the world for casting is often not the obvious thought.”

Matt Duffer echoed this sentiment: “[Carmen] was seeing a bunch of New York actors, and I just remember getting a text from her going, ‘Watch David Harbour right now!’ We watched, and we were like, ‘Boom. That’s it. That’s our guy. That’s our Hopper.’ ”

For Cuba, finding the right actors for “Stranger Things” was always about individuality. In an interview with us, she said that “the original cast members are all real individuals. None of those kids cross over into the same space as another, energetically and emotionally. To add to that and add more singular types was challenging, but I always go back to the writing of the show, and the truth is that the writing helps in lots of ways because it is just so strong.”

“They first did material that wasn’t even from ‘Stranger Things.’ I think it was from ‘Stand By Me,’ ” she continued. “Then they were all reading the same thing, so that actually was helpful in seeing how different they all were. We didn’t actively talk about it, but that’s something inherent to what casting directors do in general—because no one’s happy when they look at their cast and people feel the same as each other.”

The show’s popularity has grown exponentially over the years, which means that more famous actors began to take an interest in joining the show. But, as Cuba noted, “That became a hurdle for us, because we wanted to keep the show feeling authentic to what it was. If we were to lose ourselves and get super excited and put someone that didn’t make sense in it, it would be pretty obvious what we were doing. We had to practice restraint and still look for that authenticity and uniqueness that made the original cast work.” 

That’s what made the show such fertile ground for unknowns who had yet to achieve A-lister status.

New Year’s Eve 2025 marks the end of an era, as “Stranger Things” drops its series finale on Netflix. But the Duffer brothers’ now-iconic characters aren’t going quietly into the good night. On Nov. 6—“Stranger Things” Day in honor of the day Will Byers first went missing—the creators announced “Stranger Things” will return in 2026, but this time, as an animated series. Therefore, while there won’t be any casting calls or auditions available for the live-action series, you might still be able to venture into the Upside Down in some fashion.

“Stranger Things: Tales From ’85” follows the characters you’ve already come to know, as it takes place in the time between “Stranger Things” Seasons 2 and 3. And while the show has already cast its primary voice actors, the series will likely cast additional roles in the future, so stay tuned for updates. Until then, here are some resources to help you prepare for your voice acting audition:

• How to Become a Voice Actor
• How to Get Into Voice Acting
• 11 Tips for Voice Acting Beginners
• How to Find Voice Acting Jobs—And Get the Role
• The Voiceover Casting Process: How to Audition for Voice Acting Roles

And don’t forget to explore our roundup of sci-fi and fantasy gigs that are casting now, along with our guide on how to audition for Netflix.

This advice from the show’s CD and cast on how to prepare for a “Stranger Things” audition might come in handy as you pursue your own potentially life-changing role.

Go the extra mile. Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler) recommends showing the casting director everything you’ve got. “I remember for [the 2014 film] ‘I Believe in Unicorns,’ I ended up taping a few extra scenes from it and sending it,” the actor said. “That was one where I really, really, really wanted it. I think it’s a good strategy if you can do something [extra]. On our show, Dacre Montgomery, his famous audition tape—it catches people’s eye. Sometimes you never know if they want more or that’s really going to turn them off. It’s tricky…. The main thing you can do is be confident in what you’re giving them. The trick for an actor is: This is me, this is my version—take it or leave it. It’s a hard thing to do.”

Don’t get too caught up in the fantastical. To convincingly play resident Hawkins bad boy Billy Hargrove, Montgomery incorporated real pathos rather than leaning too hard into the sci-fi aspects of the show. “The arc [of Season 3] changed things in a big way. It put me at this precipice of having two characters playing out all the time: the possessed Billy and the Billy under that,” he told us. “So I played a lot with researching people with bipolar disorder and split personality disorder, and how one personality controls the spot and how the other fights for that. So I tried to show the latter—the personality fighting for control of the spot—in my eyes, and then the [former] in the physicality. I played it [thinking about] a real-world example like that, as opposed to playing into the science fiction and fantastical element.”

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If you’re a teen or child actor, don’t underestimate yourself. Cuba wanted to find authentic, grounded performers for the show, no matter how old they were. “We needed every single actor to have a subtlety and an inner life that didn’t necessarily need words to define them, and we held the kids and teens to the same standard,” she said. “We didn’t discuss it at the time, but it’s clear that we weren’t thinking of them as kid or teen actors in the process—the Duffer brothers were really expecting them to be able to deliver a very rich human experience despite what age body they were in.”

You belong right where you are. Nell Fisher (Holly Wheeler) joined the cast in Season 5—a decade into the show’s run—so finding her place felt daunting at first. But as she told us, you can’t let anything scare you away from pursuing your dream. “It can be intimidating going onto a set with much older actors and much more established actors, and there can be a temptation to behave in a certain way and put on a front to hide your insecurities,” Fisher said. “But my advice is that if you are on that set, you belong there. And the best way to connect with your fellow actors is to be yourself and be open. You do end up forming these really close connections that you don’t really get outside of a film set. There’s a pre-existing kind of glue, and then you just have to step into there and it all sucks you in.”

Having previous credits helps. “With child actors, it sometimes matters a lot to me if they have prior acting experience, and it sometimes doesn’t matter at all,” Cuba explained. “It depends on the role and the scope of what they have to do, the director’s style, and the simple realities of how much time they are given to shoot. In this case, it was pretty clear from early on that this would benefit greatly from actors who understood from some sort of experience [the effort the roles were] going to take and could access it and execute it at a fairly quick pace.” 

Prepare—but be ready to adapt. “The best habit I think an actor can have is to be prepared enough that he or she can use that preparation to feel confident and playful in the audition—even if it’s not necessarily for a playful role,” Cuba said. “And to not judge themselves while they are in the middle of it if they feel like it’s going sideways is also key. It’s such a vulnerable thing to go into these rooms and put everything into these fleeting moments; filling them with an actual creative exchange should be key. The worst habit is probably preparing something in such a specific way that if the casting director or director asks you to adjust or do it differently, it causes friction and stops you from being in the moment.”

Let rejection fuel your passion. As Schnapp (Will Byers) told Backstage, actors must trust the process, even when things don’t work in your favor. You cannot gauge your personal success based on someone else’s timeline. “If you are truly passionate about it and truly love it, then it will happen for you,” he said. “Rejection is redirection. You’re going to get rejected 1,000 times and 1,000 times again, and that’s just part of the business. You have to trust and accept that and know that those roles maybe weren’t meant for you, and you follow that to what eventually will lead to where [you belong]. Who would have ever thought that we stepped into that room for ‘Stranger Things’ and that changed our lives. You just never know when you’re around the corner from it.”