For a showwith doses of magic around every corner, the real resonant miracle of Stranger Things is that it gives everyone watching a taste of something they want but can’t actually have.
Adults nostalgically long for the days when their bike tires would skid out of the driveway, and mom’s faint calls of “Be back by dinner!” would fade fast on the breeze. Children today can only romanticize such notions in a helicopter-parent world, and yet they can dream of it with each pulse-pounding episode of the show.
When the paranormal, 1980s-set show debuted on Netflix last summer, it became an instant smash hit, spawning a mini-revival of E.T.-era aesthetics and a string of viral memes.
Grown women donned Peter Pan-collar dresses, dabbed fake blood under their noses and carried boxes of Eggos around to Halloween parties. Winona Ryder was reborn.
The show feels like the Stephen King novel he never wrote and the Steven Spielberg movie he never directed.
And if you scroll through the show’s cast list on IMDb, you don’t have to go too far down to find two Louisiana actors who have left their mark on the show.
Joe Chrest, a West Virginia-born actor who earned a master’s degree in theatre performance from LSU, is one of them. He stars in Stranger Things as the young protagonist’s aloof father, Ted Wheeler, appearing in 12 of the first two seasons’ 17 episodes. Peyton Wich, a New Orleans-based teen actor, appeared in six of the first season’s eight episodes as the schoolyard bully, Troy. (See our sidebar about Wich.)
“It still doesn’t feel real.” – —Joe Chrest, of the cast winning top honors at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
It’s rare for actors to receive hard copies of screenplays today, and last spring when Chrest was emailed a script for the first episode in the second season, the file sat in his inbox as an unopened attachment for a couple of days.
What if it doesn’t live up to season one? he thought.
Before that, Chrest had appeared on a few episodes of Louisiana-set mystical crime thriller True Detective with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey in 2014, then watched the next season of that popular series—in which he did not take part—plummet, with critics and fans alike panning it.
The sophomore slump is real, and not all that strange.
Netflix hauled in $2.15 billion and 3.6 million new subscribers in the third quarter of 2016, thanks to Stranger Things.
There are no Nielsen-style ratings for Netflix productions, but the show fluctuates between 94% and 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, with reviewers of all ages universally praising the show. In its first season, it quickly became Netflix’s third-most popular show, with 8.3 million people watching in its first 16 days of release.
So the only thing to match the soaring financial stakes for the streaming service series is the hype generated by fans.
“Pretty much every fan has their ideas of where Stranger Things should go with this next season,” says Chrest, who not only appears in blockbusters like The Hunger Games: Mockingjay but teaches acting to a new and hyper-creative generation here in Baton Rouge. “It’s like creative armchair quarterbacking. Everyone has iPhones and video-editing apps, so everybody is like an armchair filmmaker these days. Which is cool; it’s just different.”
Even beyond Chrest’s feelings about the show’s second season living up to its first, it’s not out of the ordinary for him to ignore a script in his inbox—or at least pieces of it.
“I don’t really read the whole script, only my scenes,” he says. “I’d rather wait and watch the other scenes on the screen. I don’t need to know what’s going on with the other characters, which I think helps my performance.”
His methodology is particularly helpful for playing a character like Ted. On the show, Ted remains blissfully unaware of the dangers his son, Mike, and daughter, Nancy, are getting into as they explore the paranormal mysteries populating their fictional Hawkins, Indiana.
“Ted is a clueless man about town, clueless about his own house,” Chrest says.
But presenting his script-reading methodology to show creators Matt and Ross Duffer was easier for Chrest to do now than it would have been for him as a younger actor. (“Actually, the Duffers were very excited about my approach,” he says. “I got the OK.”)
Pretty much every fan has their ideas of where ‘Stranger Things’ should go with this next season. —Actor Joe Chrest, who plays Ted Wheeler on the show.
That creative confidence to take a risk is something he has earned over two decades of working with some of the very best talent, such as Matt Damon, Jennifer Lawrence and Adrien Brody, along with celebrated directors Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh and Spike Lee.
Chrest does, though, recognize the hugeness of Stranger Things. In just one season, its pop-culture grip has made it a phenomenon beyond other recent Netflix successes and more on par with modern classics like The Sopranos and Mad Men.
One actress who has appeared extensively on all three of these series is Cara Buono. Having sparred romantically with Don Draper for a full season, she now plays opposite Chrest on Stranger Things as his wife, Karen Wheeler.
“Everyone on set loves working with Joe,” Buono says. “He’s so different off camera from his role that he makes us all laugh with how authentic his performance is as this ineffective dad. Just watching him in character—how he sinks into his big chair and watches TV—is hilarious and amazing.”
When the cast gets to riff a little around the Wheeler family table, it is Chrest who keeps the group laughing, Buono says—particularly his onscreen children, played by Natalia Dyer and Finn Wolfhard. “It’s really hard not to crack up when Joe is improvising,” Buono says.
Shooting on location in Georgia, Chrest has real experience living through the early 1980s that the children on the show, and even the Duffer brothers—who created the show and are only 33—do not. In between kicking around the soccer ball with his young co-stars, he’s hung out with and talked about Stanley Kubrick with co-star Matthew Modine (who appeared in Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket). While filming, the set’s impeccable design surrounds him with vintage objects he thought he’d never see again. Those things help him get into character.
Buono credits the success of Stranger Things to the realism of that ’80s aesthetic, the fantastic writing of the Duffers and a strong cross-generational appeal.
Buono, Chrest and the rest of the cast capped off season one by winning top honors at the Screen Actors Guild Awards for Best Ensemble Cast in a Drama Series.
Chrest says the experience was surreal.
“You’re running this gauntlet up to the stage, and Denzel and Octavia Spencer and Kevin Spacey are patting you on the back,” Chrest recalls. “It still doesn’t feel real, and at the time even I felt like ‘Did that happen?’ I mean, before they announced us, I was just talking to my wife, Christine, and eating dessert. Then suddenly I got nervous that I’d be up on stage with chocolate on my mouth.”
Peyton Wich and Joe Chrest give us some Stranger Things vibes for our 225 cover shoot at The 13th Gate.
For the record, Chrest did not have chocolate on his mouth, and both co-stars David Harbour’s acceptance speech and Winona Ryder’s complicated in-the-moment reaction to that speech went viral the next day. It seems everything Stranger Things does gets a lot of attention.
Three months after those awards, one of the highlights of his life, Chrest says, he has wrapped his work on season two of the show, and his nondisclosure agreements have been inked. He’s between other projects—including a major blockbuster in the making that he can’t name—and moving to a different house in Baton Rouge with his family.
On the one-year anniversary of the show debuting on Netflix, the sports fan and father of two is enjoying a slider and a salad at District Donuts in Towne Center.
It also happens to be the first day of the giant fandom frenzy known as Comic Con. Chrest declined an offer to go, and now regrets it—“I could have used the money after our Yosemite vacation, plus a free trip to San Diego? Oh well,” he laments. As NPR noted earlier that morning, a throng of Stranger Things fans were out in full force at Comic Con, some having arrived two days in advance to camp out and be among the first to enter the San Diego Convention Center.
Chrest is relaxed and speaks in an audibly smooth, though thematically circuitous cadence. Everything out of his mouth sounds like good advice, but he often takes the scenic route to get to his point.
“Joe is truly cut from a different cloth. If you spend an hour talking to him, you’ll understand that,” says John Mese, Chrest’s longtime friend and a Baton Rouge-turned-Los Angeles actor. “What’s so interesting to me is this unique individuality seeps into all his work on screen and maybe never as much as it does when he’s playing Ted on Stranger Things.”
A co-founding member of Swine Palace theater in Baton Rouge, Chrest’s unique approach to storytelling and creativity is a foundation for his acting course at LSU and the classes he leads at local high schools.
“People get Ted Wheeler-tunnel vision when they grow up,” Chrest says, referring to his character’s absentmindedness. “As people, we put on this emotional armor, but actors need to learn vulnerability.”
Baton Rouge actress Nicole Prunty is a former student of Chrest’s, and like many of those he has instructed, she’s become a fan of Stranger Things.
Peyton Wich, left, and Joe Chrest both appeared in the majority of episodes during Stranger Things’ critically acclaimed first season.
“If I had gone to LSU and only taken Joe’s classes, I would be fine with that,” Prunty says. “What makes Stranger Things a successful story to me is that it heavily relied on the acting ability of the kids. They made the show very endearing and relatable in a really crazy, surreal way.”
And as Ted Wheeler, Chrest plays a foil character to the sharp and savvy kids on the show. As first written, Wheeler was more of a glib and typical busy dad—not unlike the standard oblivious parents that often appear in horror films. But the Duffers allowed Chrest to bring more layers of realism and obscured empathy to the part.
“It actually chokes me up a little bit,” Chrest says, pausing. “This is the dad that most people I knew growing up had. They are busy, and they have things to do to make money for the family. My take on Ted is to be as loving and caring as can be in my heart, but I have other things on my mind. He’s a guy who brings his job home with him.”
When season two returns Oct. 27, Chrest and his real-life family will gather and watch his on-screen family navigate the paranormal havoc engulfing them. One episode each night, Chrest says. No binging. Just like they did with season one.
“It is very tempting to sneak and get ahead, though,” he says.
Buono, who felt an intense instinctive need to be in Stranger Things when she first read the script in 2015, remains tight-lipped about season two, but she says the Duffers have done a brilliant job with the new storylines.
“I’m most excited for everyone who loves the show to see the work of these great actors,” she says.
As for his expectations, Chrest, of course, did read that script eventually, and within two pages he was hooked.
“I was pulled into a world a year later with these characters,” he says, “and it’s completely different than I expected.”
While shooting, he confided in the Duffers about his initial apprehension and how their writing had subverted his concerns.
“They weren’t worried at all, because they have so much of this world in their heads already,” Chrest says. “I’m looking forward to seeing it play out on screen, because it really is a great continuation of the story. It goes to a whole other realm creatively.”
KNOW YOUR TV SHOW A spoiler-free guide to ‘Stranger Things’
Set in:The fictional middle-class community of Hawkins, Indiana
When: 1983
Catch up on season one: Its eight episodes, roughly 50 minutes each, are currently available on Netflix.
Created by:Matt and Ross Duffer, a talented writing/directing team of brothers who previously worked for M. Night Shyamalan on his Fox series Wayward Pines
What happens: When a young boy (Noah Schnapp) vanishes, a salty cop (David Harbour) launches an investigation, while the boy’s mother (Wynona Ryder) emotionally unravels. A trio of his school buddies (Finn Wolfhard, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin) form a spirited search party of their own. Soon a nefarious scientist (Matthew Modine), his shadowy government organization, and a mysterious young girl (Millie Bobby Brown) with surprising powers are revealed to have connections not only to the missing boy’s whereabouts, but to a dangerous alternate dimension known as the “Upside Down.”
What’s the fuss: Filled with loveable ’80s references, Stranger Things is a smart blend of family drama, old-school detective work and sci-fi thrills that is anchored by a handful of talented young stars who give the series a nostalgic coming-of-age heart.
The secret weapon: The dark synth-heavy soundtrack that skates over the new wave and arena rock of the day to zero in on what underground electronic music sounded like in the early ’80s perfectly complements the Duffer’s vintage visuals and keeps the intensity of the series boiling.
Breakout star: British actress Millie Bobby Brown as the psychokinetic “Eleven”
Awards: 72 nominations and 15 wins, including top prizes from the Screen Actors Guild and MTV Movie & TV Awards
Season 2:With the tagline “Nothing was ever going back to normal,” this season skips ahead one year to the fall of 1984 with all of the primary cast returning, plus newcomers but familiar faces Sean Astin and Paul Reiser. Prepare to binge watch, because all 9 episodes will be released by Netflix on Oct. 27.
