Maya Hawke Felt Her Job Was to ‘Facilitate’ ‘Stranger Things’ Co-Stars’ Feelings While Filming the Series Finale
Samantha Bergeson
Maya Hawke took on a mothering role while filming the final season of “Stranger Things.”
The actress told Entertainment Tonight that after joining the hit Netflix show in Season 3, she felt a responsibility to be a shoulder for her co-stars to lean on during the series finale.
“As a late addition cast member, I feel like it’s my job to be here to facilitate their feelings and just be grateful and excited to have been a part of it at all,” Hawke said, adding of the soon-to-be-released final season: “It’s already starting to be heartbreaking, you know? I mean it’s the end of a really long journey. Longer for some of my castmates, even, than for me. So it’s really sentimental.”
“Stranger Things” Season 5 will premiere later in 2024. The ensemble cast includes David Harbour, Winona Ryder, Joe Keery, Sadie Sink, Finn Wolfhard, and more.
“We shoot for a long time,” Hawke said of the sprawling sci-fi show, “so it’s kind of reinvigorating [ to bring] the joy and finding it everyday and making it new. It’s a really fun thing to do.”
Hawke previously told Collider that the final season will have an “extremely exciting” conclusion.
“I do know what happens before then and it’s extremely exciting,” Hawke said. “It’s always wonderful when the kind of riddle of a world that gets built, starts to get resolved and questions start to be answered. I think it was mind-bogglingly wonderful for me and I think audiences will feel that way too.”
She added, “It’s really an emotional thing to go into filming this last season, so I’m excited. I haven’t gotten to read the final scripts yet, so I haven’t had a reaction and I actually genuinely know nothing about the last two episodes of the show.”
“Stranger Things” series director and executive producer Shawn Levy said during the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast in November 2023 that the final season will be “epic in its cinematic scope” and rival blockbuster movies both in episode length and scope.
“I have to credit [creators] the Duffer Brothers. You read the outlines sometimes and it’s massive, but then you read the scripts and you remember again and again that their instinct for anchoring the epic in the intimate, and for anchoring the darkness of genre in the warmth of these characters, it’s so innate to them,” Levy said. “Season 5 gets bigger in scale but doesn’t forget who or what it is.”
