After a wait of what feels like years, we’re finally preparing to go back to Hawkins, Indiana for Stranger Things season 4, and the show has added some new characters to greet us when we get there.
Thanks to the pandemic shutting down production on practically everything over the past year and a bit, it’s been some time since audiences got to catch up with Eleven and friends, with season three of Stranger Things premiering on Netflix nearly two years ago, in July 2019. Back then, the demogorgon, shady Russian scientists and potential death of Hopper, possibly the only good cop in the world (albeit fictional), left us all hanging on for more. And we had a long wait to find out what happened.
Luckily for us though, the show’s creators, the Duffer brothers, kept working during lockdown, and in June last year they tweeted out a photo which indicated we had nine more episodes to look forward to when Stranger Things finally returned for its fourth season. In even better news, it seems like we have some new characters to meet as well.
Today, Netflix announced the addition of four new cast members to the Stranger Things family. New character Vickie, played by AmyBeth McNulty, is described as “a cool, fast-talking band nerd who catches the eye of one of our beloved heroes”. Grace Van Dien takes on the role of Chrissy, Hawkins’ High head cheerleader and resident popular girl, who is hiding a dark secret beneath a seemingly perfect surface. Myles Truitt will take on the character of Patrick, “a Hawkins basketball star who has friends, talent, and a good life…until shocking events send his life spiraling out of control”, and Regina Ting Chen will appear as guidance counsellor Ms Kelly.
If that wasn’t enough to get you excited about the new series, there’s also been some more teaser releases from the Stranger Things team, including a seriously creepy teaser trailer, and the news that horror veteran Robert Englund (famous for giving the world a nightmare-inducing performance as Freddy Krueger) will appear as the new, similarly horrifying character Victor Creel. Described as “a disturbed and intimidating man who is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s”, it sounds like he’ll help take the series’ fourth installment to a new level of creepy.
There’s no news just yet on when the fourth season will drop on Netflix though, so until then we’ll just have to decipher the clues in the show’s mysterious teaser trailer, and wait for the Demogorgon to strike again.