When Matt and Ross Duffer, the affable identical twins behind the TV phenomenon Stranger Things, wrote the pilot script for that show, they did not expect it to ever become a West End play. But then that was one of quite a few things that they didn’t foresee almost a decade ago.
For starters, the Duffer Brothers, as they are known and credited, did not expect Stranger Things to exist beyond one season. They envisaged the story as being a “long-form movie” about a child who is mysteriously kidnapped in 1983 and his friends and family who try to get him back. “What would a Stephen King book look like if it were directed by Steven Spielberg,” was the pitch, says Matt now. The giant, spider-like Mind Flayer, Vecna, and even the parallel universe they call the Upside Down, so familiar now to fans after four seasons of the show on Netflix: none of these had yet been imagined.
Mostly, though, what the 39-year-old Duffers didn’t anticipate was the show’s popularity. Stranger Things, mainly through word of mouth, has become the most watched English-language series in Netflix history. When season four was released in late May 2022, it racked up 1.35bn viewed hours in 28 days. In the process, the show sent the Kate Bush song Running Up That Hill – a recurring motif of the season – to the top of the charts, 37 years after it was first released, and inspired a tidal wave of 1980s nostalgia, from rugby shirts to pudding-bowl haircuts. The show has also created legions of breakout stars: new faces such as Millie Bobby Brown (who plays Eleven), Finn Wolfhard (Mike) and Maya Hawke (Robin), and revivifying familiar ones, such as Winona Ryder and Matthew Modine, who plays the chilling Dr Martin Brenner.
Stranger Things has become of almost existential importance to Netflix: in the first quarter of 2022, the streamer lost 200,000 subscribers and $50bn in market value. The Duffers’ hit, returning after a three-year hiatus, was Netflix’s big play to win them back.
No, the brothers did not see any of that coming back in 2016, when the original season aired. “Our career wasn’t really rocketing at that point,” admits Matt Duffer, on a video call from Atlanta, where the brothers are preparing to shoot Stranger Things season five. “We had made one movie for Warner Bros, which Warner Bros didn’t end up liking, and they just dumped it. Ross and I had dreams of being film-makers; we wanted to direct more films, but every meeting we kept going to, no one was interested in any of our movie ideas.”
That’s not false modesty on their part. The movie Matt’s talking about is Hidden, a claustrophobic, post-apocalyptic thriller starring Alexander Skarsgård and Andrea Riseborough, which was shot in 2012 but buried by the studio for three years. (For what it’s worth, Hidden is very decent: tight, smart and unsettling in all the good ways.) So the brothers were not exactly bullish about Stranger Things making any kind of mark. “Because, in reality, our only prior experience in Hollywood ended in utter failure,” says Matt. “So we did not envision what’s occurred, which is five seasons in...”
There have been a few unlikely developments in those intervening years: for one, King and Spielberg are now admirers and collaborators. But the theatre thing – that’s the most “surreal” in Ross Duffer’s mind. The impetus came from another Stephen, this time Daldry, the British director whose screen work includes Billy Elliot and The Crown, and whose theatre output has earned him multiple Olivier and Tony awards.
Daldry loved Stranger Things and approached Cindy Holland, at that time the head of original content at Netflix – which also makes The Crown – about turning it into a stage show. “When we first heard about it, we assumed it must be: ‘Oh, they want to do a musical out of season one’ or something like that,” says Matt. “That was the lame idea that immediately popped into my head. Like, I thought that’s what you would do.”
But that wasn’t what Daldry had in mind at all: he wanted an original story, set in the Stranger Things universe, and he wanted British playwright and screenwriter Jack Thorne, who has had a golden touch since writing the 2016 stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, to develop it. Sonia Friedman, one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2018, who was also behind the success and global rollout of Cursed Child, would be the producer.
The Duffers were thrilled with this idea, but pretty much as soon as it was presented to them, it was snatched away. Netflix wanted Daldry to prioritise The Crown, for which he is an executive producer, and Thorne was in demand to write other projects. “When Stephen got sucked back into The Crown, it kind of vanished for a second,” says Ross. “And Matt and I just assumed it was one of those dreams that would never be.” Matt adds: “And we were like: ‘Why even... Please don’t tell me this! Why are you dangling something that’s not even possible?’”
The delay, though, turned out to be “the best thing ever”, says Matt. The brothers started writing season four and developed a new character called Henry Creel. In the TV show, told through brief flashbacks of him as a child in the 1950s, Creel moves to Hawkins, Indiana, the fictional setting for Stranger Things. He has disturbing, supernatural powers with a psychotic twist and ultimately transforms into the monstrous Vecna, who torments the town three decades later. The Duffers, Daldry and Thorne agreed that Creel’s backstory, largely untouched upon in the series, would be fertile territory for the new play. “Exploring what, if any, humanity Henry had before he went full-blown, you know, Darth Vader,” says Matt, smiling.
“The idea for the play itself actually came really quickly: I think within a day,” Matt continues. “The fact that it came that easily, it felt like, ‘OK, there’s a reason for this to exist.’ The play itself took a lot of effort, four years-plus, but I always find if you’re straining too hard to come up with an idea, it’s never a good sign.”
Stranger Things: The First Shadow, still directed by Daldry, though written not by Thorne but by one of the Duffers’ in-house TV writers, Kate Trefry, opened for previews at the Phoenix theatre in London last month. When we speak, the brothers are still in near daily communication with the London team, tinkering with details before the world premiere on 14 December. It is a wildly ambitious undertaking, packed with stunts and light effects: “The goal always was for it to just feel like a mega-episode of the show, but live on stage,” says Matt. Ross, meanwhile, seems in a state of mild disbelief that the stage show is actually going ahead. “It’s one of those things that until it happens, you never believe it,” he says.
The official line on The First Shadow is that it “enriches” the Stranger Things television experience: you do not need to have watched the show to enjoy the play, they say; however, if you are a superfan, The First Shadow will give depth and drop hints that bridge seasons four and five. There are legions of Stranger Things obsessives out there, so shifting seats for the stage show should not be a problem. However, the play does represent a gamble for the Duffers. They have already made clear that season five will be the finale of the show and have also long talked of wanting to expand the world of Stranger Things with spin-offs. The First Shadow, in this way, could be proof of concept. It is also Netflix’s first venture into live stage production: if it works, who knows what other shows could be adapted?
The brothers, who have seen The First Shadow twice in London, appear confident. “Watching this play as an audience member fresh… to me it seemed flawless,” says Matt. Then he pauses, smiles. “Like I can hear Stephen [Daldry] laughing in my ear, but to me it seemed flawless.”
* * *
Matt and Ross, unhelpfully, appear on separate video screens at the same exact moment with the same ID: “the Duffer Brothers”. Helpfully, though, the twins are easier to tell apart than you may fear. Matt has longer, bouncier hair, with a streak of grey, and is the more animated talker; Ross is slightly shaggier, with a warm smile and self-deprecating modesty. “Even though we are twins, we each have our own strengths and weaknesses,” says Ross. “What weaknesses?” interrupts Matt, playfully, who stops every so often to eat a mouthful of cereal. “If we get into it, I feel like we might start an argument.”
On Stranger Things, the Duffers take every decision together. When they are drafting a script, they often sit opposite each other on separate computers, working on a shared Google Doc. The director M Night Shyamalan, who hired them as writers for his 2015 TV drama Wayward Pines, fondly called them a “two-headed creative monster” in the New York Times. However, the brothers do gravitate towards different comfort zones.
“I’m a little more introverted,” says Ross. “There’s safety for me in the writers’ room with a smaller group of people. And Matt thrives on set more with the larger group. So that would be the most obvious difference between us. So he’ll lean on me in those moments and I’ll lean on him in the other moments. And we’ve never done this apart, and I’m sure we could if need be, but I don’t see why we would, because there’s a safety there with one another.”
One recent change is that Matt has a one-year-old child (Winona Ryder is the godmother). “Matt has a family now and our lives have continued to change as the show has grown,” says Ross. “So I would say that’s adjusted our working relationship more than anything.”
The brothers were born in Durham, North Carolina, in 1984, the year after Stranger Things begins, to parents Ann and movie-obsessed Allen. The brothers’ first film collaboration happened when they were nine or 10: after seeing Tim Burton’s 1989 moody riff on Batman, they started making their own home videos on a camcorder with a neighbour. They continued making shorts through school, with better cameras, before studying film at Chapman University in California.
Looking back on their childhood films, the Duffers note they were typically violent, often with a streak of horror or incorporating fantasy elements: in short, not a million miles from Stranger Things. And the emotion that making them evokes hasn’t changed much, either. “Yeah, it feels the same now as when we were creatively excited and happy all the way back in middle school and high school,” says Matt. “The feeling itself doesn’t change… there’s just a lot more noise around us now.”
The Duffers think too much is made of the 1980s setting of Stranger Things, specifically the charge that the show owes much of its popularity with viewers to nostalgia (in part because perhaps their biggest demographic – teenagers and young adults – have zero actual memories from that era). “It’s more about a tone,” insists Ross. “It’s more about this juxtaposition between ordinary and extraordinary. These friendships of various generations of people coming together to fight something extraordinary, and the awe and the fear that comes with that. It’s not about the 1980s.”
Still, it is a test for The First Shadow to see if audiences will buy into a Stranger Things story not set in the 1980s. “I equate the 1950s to… it’s 1980s-like,” says Matt. “People our age have some nostalgia for the 80s. When you were our age in the 80s, you had nostalgia for the 1950s. That’s when our dad grew up. That’s the music we grew up listening to. There’s no secret that the show is heavily inspired by Stephen King’s It, which was set in the 50s. Diner, one of our favourite movies, is set in the 50s. Stand By Me. We’ve always been drawn to that era.”
The First Shadow features many characters familiar from the TV series: not the original kids (Will, Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Eleven) of course (because they weren’t even born in the 1950s), but fresh-faced incarnations of Joyce Byers (played by Ryder in the TV show), Jim Hopper (David Harbour) and Bob Newby (Sean Astin) as their younger selves. At the heart of the play are Creel and a new character, Patty Newby, played on stage by West End newcomers Louis McCartney and Ella Karuna Williams. The introduction of Patty – “a love story of types between Patty and Henry”, explains Matt – was the suggestion of Thorne, as a way to bring a dash of humanity to Henry.
“Yeah,” agrees Ross. “And usually in a Stranger Things season, we introduce someone new to the world and for us it’s helpful in that it’s like a new pair of eyes for the audience to experience this world through. So Patty is following in those footsteps. The goal is that you have a much better understanding of Henry when seeing this and see a little bit more of how he got to where he is. And then there’s a bit in the play that is starting to hint at where we’re headed with the final season of the show. That was always the balancing act.”
The Duffers are open, and enjoy teasing a storyline, but they would rather not reveal too much of the specifics of The First Shadow. Partly, this coyness is practical: if the play does well, it will transfer presumably to Broadway and then to other cities before Stranger Things season five drops on Netflix in 2025. But most of their reticence, they insist, comes from a deep dislike of spoilers. It infuriates the Duffers that films such as Shyamalan’s 1999 thriller The Sixth Sense would be stripped of their shock power in the internet age. And they have still not forgiven a friend in middle school who ruined the ending of Seven.
“Of course you don’t even have to have seen the play,” says Matt. “Just go on to Reddit and there’s a list of all the spoilers if you want them. Which I would encourage people not to do because reading a list of spoilers is never the best way to experience something. That’s just my, you know, view. I had friends who would read the last page of a book first. I don’t know what that is. I hate that. I love being surprised.”
The Duffers may have handed over day-to-day running of The First Shadow to Daldry, Friedman and Trefry, but they are well aware that their reputation could ride on the outcome. Or at least the viability of telling more stories with the Stranger Things characters, which they clearly are desperate to do.
excuse our mess… pic.twitter.com/38FRV5pT9A
— Stranger Things (@Stranger_Things) September 12, 2023
A teaser clip from the fifth and final series of Stranger Things
“The play is coming from a very genuine place and a passionate place,” says Matt. “Neither us nor Netflix said: ‘Hey, let’s do a Stranger Things play!’ That didn’t come from us or Netflix. That came from Stephen Daldry himself, who we didn’t know. It wasn’t like we shopped this around, and we met with a ton of people and we happened to land on Stephen Daldry. It was like, no, one of the greatest living theatre directors came to us and Netflix and said: ‘I want to do this.’
“Meaning it’s the opposite of a cash grab, right?” Matt goes on. “There’s nothing forced about it. And I think that’s why it’s good. When franchises are just driven by: ‘Hey, we just need more quote-unquote content in this universe.’ And you have a ton of people pitching ideas, and no one’s particularly passionate about it, that’s how you end up with something bad.”
* * *
The fifth and final season of Stranger Things, which ground to a halt during this year’s Writers Guild of America strike, is now written; shooting starts in January. In preparation, the Duffers have been rewatching other touchstone, long-running TV shows from the past 30 years to see what tips they can pick up about, in Ross’s words: “How to land the plane safely.”
What did they learn? In short: that it’s devilishly hard not leave a lot of viewers unsatisfied and often apoplectic. Matt uses an analogy from American football to explain the near impossible situation they find themselves in. “The nine hours that precede the ending can be amazing,” he says, with a wistful shake of the head. “But if you stumble at that one-yard line, people will never forgive you for that. And they’ll forget the previous nine hours of awesomeness! So it’s amazing what they will forgive if you score a touchdown at the end.
“Endings of shows are like opening a restaurant in terms of the success-failure rate – there’s an 80% failure rate, I’d say,” he continues. “But I think one very particular way to fail is to attempt to appease everybody. We have a huge variety of fans that span a huge age range and I’m sure they have all their own ideas of how they want the show to end. But we’re not consulting social media on this. Then you just hope and pray that it resonates. But it was funny: once we got there, it just felt right and we’re going to go for it!”
When the TV show’s over, the Duffers predict that they will go through the five stages of grief: mainly, they say, they’ll be sad to never again spend time with the characters they have created. They have other projects lined up – they are set to be producers on The Talisman, which, full circle, is a King novel (co-written with Peter Straub) that Spielberg owns the rights to direct – but mainly they want Stranger Things to go out with a bang.
“This season – it’s like season one on steroids,” says Matt. “It’s the biggest it’s ever been in terms of scale, but it has been really fun, because everyone’s back together in Hawkins: the boys and Eleven interacting more in line with how it was in season one. And, yes, there may be spin-offs, but the story of Eleven and Dustin and Lucas and Hopper, their stories are done here. That’s it…
“Outside of the play,” he teases. “So if you want to see more of some of them, go see the play.”
• Stranger Things: The First Shadow is at the Phoenix theatre, London, until 25 August 2024
