Perfect Stranger
Stranger Things director and executive producer Shawn Levy reflects on a decade of working with the Duffer Brothers on Netflix’s global hit series, balancing character with standout action sequences, and why he wants the show’s legacy to be its rule-breaking ambitions.
Shawn Levy is in London to direct the latest adventure in the Star Wars universe: the Ryan Gosling-led Starfighter. The standalone feature is due in cinemas in 2027.
But before joining one iconic sci-fi saga, he helped to bring another – Netflix series Stranger Things – to its long-awaited conclusion.
“Well, I can sincerely say there are no other tasks or commitments I would be making time for while shooting Star Wars other than Stranger Things, and it’s a testament to how much this show and experience means to me that it’s my pleasure to carve out the time to reflect on a decade-long legacy that I will be proud of forever,” he tells DQ. “I’m truly grateful, not just because it’s been such a global success, but it’s been a truly inspiring part of my creative life for the last 10 years.”
Beginning in the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana, in 1983, Stranger Things opens with the story of a strange girl with supernatural abilities who escapes from Hawkins National Laboratory shortly after the disappearance of 12-year-old Will Byers, kicking off an otherworldly adventure that leads a group of kids to search for their missing friend and encounter monsters and demons from a shadowy parallel world known as the Upside Down.
Now in season five, set in the fall of 1987, Hawkins is scarred by the opening of Rifts to the Upside Down. With the gang united by a single goal to kill Vecna, the Upside Down’s sinister ruler, all roads lead to a final battle with an enemy more deadly than anything they’ve faced before.
The extensive ensemble cast includes Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers, David Harbour as Jim Hopper and Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven, alongside Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair), Noah Schnapp (Will Byers), Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield), Natalia Dyer (Nancy Wheeler), Charlie Heaton (Jonathan Byers), Joe Keery (Steve Harrington), Maya Hawke (Robin Buckley), Jamie Campbell Bower (Vecna) and Linda Hamilton (Dr Kay).
Levy has directed two episodes in each of Stranger Things’ five seasons while serving as an executive producer across the show’s entire run. In fact, it was Levy’s production company 21 Laps Entertainment that first took a chance on a script from the then relatively unknown Duffer Brothers – Ross and Matt – that tapped into 1980s nostalgia and the work of iconic storytellers like Steven Spielberg, John Carpenter and Stephen King.
“I was a movie director who’d been blessed with a fair bit of success at that point. I wasn’t even looking to be involved in television, but this script came along,” Levy remembers. “It was called Montauk back then, and it was just such a propulsive read that was somehow both kinetic and emotional. There was something in that combination of genre and character-rooted story that felt unique and absolutely captivating.
“So I called the boys into my office, and they were shy, fairly insular, internal young men, but I knew their talent was incredibly rare. I told them what I felt, which was, ‘I don’t know who’s going to make this. I don’t know who’s going to watch this. I just know it can be truly fucking great. And I want to help you bring this into the world.’”
Stranger Things became an instant global phenomenon following its debut on Netflix in July 2016, with subsequent seasons airing in 2017, 2019 and 2022 respectively. S5 launched with volume one last month, with volume two set to become available from 5pm PST tomorrow. The series finale will be released at 5pm PST on December 31.
With each new season came the expansion of the show’s world, introducing new creatures and villains from the Upside Down, from Demogorgons to the Mind Flayer and Vecna. The challenge then became how to keep the characters front and centre, not least in S5 with trailers foreshadowing the ultimate battle to come.
“Because the marketing of season five leans so heavily into the scale of this season, I can assure everyone this season is no less character-rich and emotional than the ones that came before,” Levy says. “In fact, the last episode of the last season of Stranger Things is as emotional, if not more so, as any episode we’ve ever done.
“The whole challenge is never forgetting what made our show special, and that is the combination of the epic with the intimate. So no matter how complex and grandiose the cinematic sequences have become, the Duffers and all of us never forget to anchor it all in character and these relationships that the world has invested in so emotionally over the last near decade.”
Levy says he first learned of how the Duffers planned to end the show during a pitch meeting in 2023, “and it knocked me out.” He felt that same emotional power when he read it on the page and listened to the script being performed in the final cast readthrough.
“But none of that prepared me for watching the final episode,” he continues. “We all worked our asses off on this thing, but this final episode is truly a Duffer achievement. I watched it at the end of a shoot day on Star Wars while living here on location in London, and it just wrecked me. It wrecked me so emotionally that it wasn’t enough to text or email the bros; I FaceTimed them and proceeded to utterly humiliate myself because I couldn’t get through three sentences without sobbing.
“It was that emotional for me. And even with the intimate connection I’ve had to this show all these years, the finale was so good that I experienced it as just an audience member, and that’s a real testament to the virtuoso storytelling the Duffers pulled together in that last episode.”
Across the whole series, Levy says the Duffers maintained a commitment to ensuring every character, and the mythology of the series, gets a satisfying payoff by its conclusion. He also credits them with the “superpower” of bringing together character pairings that “no one saw coming,” not least Dustin and Steve, Robin and Steve, or Robin and Will in S5.
“I really credit Matt and Ross for recognising the gifts of our actors and the surprising ways in which unlikely scene partners can create captivating relationships,” he says. “One of the joys of dozens of episodes over the course of nine-and-a-half years is the luxury of exploring those unexpected relationships and dynamics.”
Working over such a long period with a group of child actors – many of whom are now stars outside the realm of Stranger Things – “we decided early on we weren’t going to pretend the kids weren’t growing up. As the Harry Potter franchise did, we’ve tried to embrace the passage of time and evolve story alongside the evolution and maturation of our actors,” Levy says. “We’ve also been very blessed with the introduction of new characters, some of whom live, some of whom have died, but all of whom have been played in such memorable fashion by these actors, ranging from Joe Keery to Dacre Montgomery [as Billy Hargroves] and Sean Astin [Bob Newby].
“These actors come in and create singular characters that are absolutely rooted in phenomenal screenwriting, but characters that come to inhabit the unique ethos of the actors, and that’s always been something the actors on our show have been encouraged to do – to take what’s on the page but to make bold choices as actors that make the characters on the screen singular and very much of them and expressive of them as performers.”
Behind the camera, Levy has also witnessed the evolution of the show’s filming style, first and foremost through the scale and ambition of the visual and practical effects that are utilised to create Hawkins, the Upside Down, some audacious set pieces and even the look of its villains.
He also points to a change that took place in S1, when “what started off as a fairly static, compositional approach to the visuals evolved through our episodes, first on my own episodes, three and four, and then very much carried on by the Duffers,” the director says. “Suddenly, the camera was moving a lot more than in the first couple of episodes. We got to really exploit tools like the Technocrane, the Steadicam and, in some cases, handheld so that there is a dynamic visual style that feels definitively not what used to be called ‘television style.’ It’s not just people stopping and saying words and static close-ups. We like to involve the camera in a dynamic way.”
When directing Stranger Things, Levy has always taken his cues from the Duffers’ scripts that call for Spielbergian filmmaking. “We don’t shy away from ‘movie moments.’ We love heightened, augmented stakes and shots and visuals that express a larger-than-life storytelling,” he says. “These are monsters and interdimensional lost kids and creatures. We were never setting out to make a generic, naturalistic, grounded show. We were always setting out to make a cinematic, movie-inspired, heightened story, and so it required a heightened visual style alongside it.”
With S5, Levy says every episode has at least one sequence that caused cast and crew to wonder, “How the hell are we going to do that?”, noting that one sequence in episode six seemed completely unachievable. But having previously directed episodes three and four in each season, Levy thought the “impossible” task would be left to someone else.
“Then, of course, my Deadpool & Wolverine schedule compelled me to not direct episode three and four like every other year. Cut to, I’m the director of episode six, so I got to figure out a sequence that was as hard to R&D and design and prep as anything I’ve ever had to do in a major motion picture.”
Another particularly tricky sequence from S5 proved to be an episode two scene with Karen (Cara Buono) and Holly (Nell Fisher) hiding together beneath the bubble-covered surface of a full bathtub in the Wheeler house bathroom during an attack from a Demogorgon.
While it read as “super cool” on the page, “how do you actually do that? And how do you do a shot like the Duffers ended up doing, where the camera transitions from above water to below, all in one?” Levy asks. “That’s an example of a single line in the script that took weeks and, in some cases, months in later episodes to figure out the ‘how.’ But it’s worth it. All that incredible and often stressful, exhausting, hard work is worth it when you can create a moment that sticks forever.”
For Levy, there’s “no better example” of the work that goes into the show than the prep involved in S4 episode Dear Billy, which culminates in Vecna’s attack on Max – and the much-talked about needle drop of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill.
“The reward for all the hard work we do on Stranger Things is you’re creating moments that connect with the whole world and stick around in the culture long after the launch date of the episode,” Levy says. “That is dream-come-true stuff for storytellers like the Duffers and me.”
Now as he continues work on his Star Wars movie, part of a franchise whose legacy is already secure in cinematic history, what will be the legacy of Stranger Things? Levy’s hope is that it is proof that every rule in television production is a rule waiting to be broken.
“Nobody wanted Stranger Things because it broke a cardinal rule of being a show about kids that wasn’t for kids,” he says. “So a healthy disrespect for the so-called rules is a core legacy, and also the benefits of a network or streamer taking a chance on unknown brothers being produced by a movie director who wasn’t a television producer, and doing a show that broke so many rules but connected with people around the world.
“I hope the legacy is ‘take chances.’ Take chances and take those leaps of faith on talent, because the reward can be staggering. We’ve launched one of the biggest television franchises in television history. But no one saw that coming, starting with the day I read this script. We just bet on it because we knew it could be great. And here we are, 10 years later, having created a forever title. That’s very gratifying.”
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