Netflix original Stranger Things is a creepy, cool, and immensely popular series that's
also a trippy blast from the past.
Can't get enough of the gang from Hawkins?
Let's go behind the scenes, via interviews and tidbits dropped by the cast, to uncover
the most bizarre and oddball occurrences on the set of Stranger Things.
Everyone loves the Stranger Things '80s vibe — especially Generation X fans who grew
up in the era in which the beloved horror-dramedy takes place.
The producers have taken great care to make sure all the details are accurate — from
those old kitchen telephones with the long cords to the shape of the Burger King logo
to the exact same toys many of us had as kids.
We don't know for sure, but we're guessing there must be a whole team of people on staff
whose job it is to procure '80s memorabilia and make sure everything is precisely the
same as it was back in the day — even the channel-surfing.
"... a large part of Lebanon."
"Today, Syria has become a home for..."
"I HAVE THE POWER!!"
In fact, one might even say that the showrunners kind of go a little bit overboard when it
comes to making sure all the details are accurate.
Star Millie Bobby Brown told Teen Vogue,
"We genuinely live in the '80s world when we're on set.
Everything, to the underwear that we're given.
We get tighty-whiteys."
Now that is true commitment to detail.
We'll just come out and say it: Adults don't usually create problems at work because they
can't contain their farts.
Not usually, anyway.
"Uh-oh: Fart."
"Yeah, Charlie Babbit, I'll hold."
"Fart."
"Did you fart, Ray?"
“Did you f--kin' fart?"
"Fart."
But kids have no such hang-ups because kids think farts are hilarious, and also because
kids are refreshingly if inconveniently unembarrassed about bodily functions.
"Lucas!
Lucas!"
"What?
What happened?"
In 2016, showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer discussed the ups and downs of flipping vans
and working with child actors in an article for Entertainment Weekly, saying,
"Millie [Bobby Brown] was getting more and more frustrated with [her male co-stars].
Case in point: We're shooting a scene in the abandoned bus, and one of the boys decides
to fart.
More than once.
It became so toxic in the bus that the crew had to temporarily evacuate."
Tactfully, no one has revealed the identity of either he who smellt it, nor he who dealt
it, although the moment was memorable enough that David Harbour also brought it up in a
Reddit discussion, writing,
"They would sometimes fart during takes.
Yup.
Kids.
Little human beings with big important jobs, farting during takes — I won't say which
one.
They were amazing, I am in awe of their talent."
Showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer told NPR that Millie Bobby Brown is an incredible actress
with an instinct beyond what most kids her age are capable of.
Matt Duffer noted, however, that it's easy to forget one thing, saying,
"But at the same time she's a little girl, too.
You forget.
You know, like the kiss with Finn [Wolfhard], who plays Mike, you know, there was a two-month
buildup to that about how disgusting it's going to be, about how horrible and why did
you write this in?
So yeah, she's still 11."
"No!"
"You have got to understand that there are consequences to your actions.”
But that wasn't the end of Brown's childlike antics on set — the Duffers also said she
once delayed shooting for 45 minutes because of … glitter.
Matt told NPR,
"One day she showed up on set and she [was] just covered head to toe in glitter.
And she's like, 'I don't know where this glitter came from.'
And it's like I'm not having this problem with any of my adult actors.
David Harbour is not coming in covered in glitter."
"I'm excited for this, please."
It seems like it would be fun to get paid to eat burgers and fries for a scene in a
TV show.
Of all the excuses for consuming calories that our brains typically invent to make us
feel okay about stopping at Jack in the Box, that one is at least legitimate.
No burgers and fries, no paycheck.
Cool, right?
The truth is, though, that eating fast food for money isn't always what you've probably
fantasized it is.
In fact, Millie Bobby Brown told Bon Appetit that her burgers and fries scene in Season
1 was, quote, "the worst day in the world."
She said,
"I had to stuff my face with cold fries.
They were so greasy.
I had like three burgers, and I'd put them in my mouth, and they were cold.
I was like, are you kidding me?
I had a cup beside me, and I would say 'Eleven,' and then I would spit the burger into the
cup and come back up."
Okay, but what about the Eggos, though?
Surely there was some truth to Eleven's love of Eggos?
Well …
"I liked them at first.
I was like, 'Oh!
This isn't too bad!'
It was just the amount of times I was doing it — seven or eight times.
[…] And then I was like, 'Okay.
Now I need a spit bucket.
I'm going to throw up.'"
Horror films and shows always seem to go hand in hand with spooky on-set happenings, but
in the case of Stranger Things, there doesn't seem to be much of that.
However, there is one real-life death loosely connected to the production.
And it did happen on-set, although the set itself didn't technically become a Stranger
Things set until five months after the incident.
The mall where Stranger Things Season 3 was filmed was the site of a gruesome and horrible
murder in December 2017.
Nineteen-year-old Silling A. Man was found murdered in a vacant Subway restaurant inside
the Gwinnet Place mall in Duluth, Georgia.
Her body had been there for two weeks before anyone noticed.
That's because the mall, which looks pretty much exactly like it looked in the '80s, is
dying — the entire food court was vacant at the time, and so were many of the stores.
Customers were rare, and there just wasn't anyone regularly visiting that end of the
shopping center.
There's no happy ending to this story, but the victim's boyfriend was eventually charged
with the crime.
There are a lot of complications in working with child actors, and one of them is that
you can't always ask kids to do the same things you can ask adults to do.
And one of the things you can most definitely not ask kids to do is float around in icy-cold
water at 3 o'clock in the morning.
In the first season of Stranger Things, there's a scene where a body is discovered in a quarry
— a body that all the characters think is Will's.
According to Vulture, the crew originally planned to use a dummy, but worried that it
just wouldn't look real enough, so they found a stand-in to take over the role.
Producer Shawn Levy told the outlet,
"We asked a stuntwoman to go into that icy 3 a.m. water as Will Byers so that it would
look maximum convincing."
The person chosen for the role was, in Levy's words, "a grown-ass woman" in her 30s.
To complete the look, they dressed her in Will's costume and a short-hair wig.
Levy continued,
"She had to lay perfectly still.
It was like 3 a.m. and really crazy cold.
But that is what we ended up using."
Because part of the plot of Season 1 revolves around a lookalike dead Will Byers, the crew
did have a dummy that they used in a few scenes to portray the deceased Will Byers lookalike.
But there is such a thing as being too close to your work, and it's clear that when your
work involves creating dummies that look exactly like living actors...you should probably still
try to be sensitive to those living actors' moms and dads.
"Hello?"
"Hi Karen, it's Joyce."
"Oh Joyce, hi!"
"Hi."
"What the hell Mike?"
"Quiet!"
"Was that Will I heard back there?"
"Will?
No, it's just Mike."
In a 2016 Entertainment Weekly article, the Duffer brothers recall the moment when they
got their "very own dead body of [actor] Noah Schnapp," writing,
"If you have a dark side like we do, this was a creepy and fun present."
Okay, so that's mildly disturbing, but then they did something that was a little ethically
questionable ...
"We immediately took Noah's mom aside, told her we had something to show her, and led
her into a dark closet where we had propped up this frighteningly realistic corpse of
her son.
She was startled at first, and we felt like maybe we crossed a line, but after the initial
shock, she loved it."
Fortunately for the Duffers and their continued employment of Noah Schnapp, Noah's mom got
over her initial shock, and reportedly even posed for selfies with her son's fake corpse.
So that's...cool.
It will not surprise you to hear that there were a few other pranks on the set of Stranger
Things.
Because when you have a cast full of kids and they're not all on camera at the same
time, there's going to be some down time, and they're going to get bored.
And what better way to stave off boredom than to prank the people who are employing you?
Now, most of us ordinary adult humans can't get away with that because we're not kids
and we're also not stars who literally cannot be fired because we're the entire reason for
the existence of the company.
And that's all pretty fertile ground for pranking.
According to Business Insider, one of Millie Bobby Brown's most epic pranks involved faking
an illness in the grossest way possible.
Brown said in a Facebook Live video,
"Our first, we pranked the Duffers and we pretended that I was really sick.
We put water in my mouth and then started puking up the water."
"Yeah!
That was a good prank!"
Brown and Noah Schnapp also decided to prank their costume designer by making her think
her wedding was ruined.
Schnapp and Brown called her up and impersonated employees from the venue where she was planning
to have her wedding, and then told her that the venue was no longer available.
They even prepared a script and some hold music.
Schnapp pretended to be the venue's manager, and the prank was evidently so successful
that the costume designer yelled at him, and then they had to apologize.
"I'm not trying to be a jerk, okay?
But we're not kids anymore.
I mean what did you think, really?"
You may be shocked to hear that Millie Bobby Brown possesses no actual super powers, which
means that epic van-flipping scene from the first season had to be done the old fashioned
way: with explosives.
In a 2016 Entertainment Weekly interview, the Duffer brothers called the shoot "a lot
of fun […] and very stressful."
Naysayers on the production team told the Duffers it was impossible to flip a van that
size that high into the air.
The brothers kept pushing, though, until they were allowed to prove the concept in a parking
lot.
That went off perfectly, of course, because the cameras weren't rolling — but then they
had to do it for real on location.
Well, during the for-real shoot, one of the explosives failed to go off, and the van skidded
off-course and into one of the cameras, destroying it.
That was bad, but the Duffers were determined to get the shot.
Their next task was convincing the producers to overlook the fact that the failed shoot
had cost thousands of dollars so they could try it yet again.
Fortunately, the second attempt turned out to be the winner.
And you thought really good modern special effects could only be computer-generated.
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