Rock n’ roll, baby! Joseph Quinn plays metalhead and Dungeons & Dragons extraordinaire Eddie Munson on the upcoming season of Netflix’s Stranger Things — a role he sees as an essential addition to the show’s depiction of 1980s culture.
“He’s an 80s metalhead, he’s a Dungeon Master, he’s head of the Hellfire Club, which is the official Dungeons & Dragons club at Hawkins High,” the England native, 29, said to Collider about his character Eddie Munson earlier this month. “He’s really in and amongst all of the crazy stuff that I can’t talk about this season.”
Eddie may be a new addition to part 4 of the Netflix hit, which premieres May 27, but he’s also a representation of the show’s biggest themes. The rocker is a symbol for the “satanic panic” that took hold of the decade after the public became obsessed with equating anything from rock music to fantasy games with the worship of the devil.
“It was really kind of an interesting time,” the Game of Thrones alum told Inverse magazine in May about the research he did into the period. “Heavy metal really stands in the face of rusty American values. And it’s very kind of it’s a real stark contrast. I think it must have been kind of crazy. I think it’s really explored very brilliantly in this season.”
Season 4 of the science fiction drama picks up less than a year after season 3 ends and follows the fractured Hawkins gang as they attempt to deal with the horrors of high school. The Byers family (Winona Ryder, Charlie Heaton and Noah Schnapp) and a powerless Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) remain thousands of miles away in California as those left behind — including Mike (Finn Wolfard), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Max (Sadie Sink), Nancy (Natalia Dyer) and Steven (Joe Keery) face a new threat from the Upside Down.
The Duffer Brothers, who called season 4 of Stranger Things their “Game of Thrones season” during an interview with Collider in April, cast Quinn after he portrayed Koner on the HBO fantasy series in 2018. The actor, who gets directly thrown into the show’s biggest storyline, agreed with the director duo that the newest installment of the supernatural thriller matches GOT in terms of scope.
“Some of the stuff that we got to do … I can’t talk about, [but] was great,” he told Entertainment Weekly earlier this month. “There was one sequence in the woods. It was a night shoot. We got there and the whole forest was lit up. It was so thrilling. There’s some sequences in it that are just — going to be massive, I think.”
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