SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 5, Volume 1 of “Stranger Things.”
In the battle that concludes Volume 1 of “Stranger Things 5” — in “Sorcerer,” written and directed by Matt and Ross Duffer — it appears at first that all is lost. The murderous creatures of the Upside Down have breached the military zone, and begin a mass slaughter of the soldiers, who’ve underestimated their foes. Elsewhere, Robin (Maya Hawke) and Murray (Brett Gelman) try to bring some of the endangered school children of Hawkins to safety in a truck, as they’re chased by Demogorgons. Meanwhile, the good guys’ biggest assets, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Hopper (David Harbour), are in the base in the Upside Down, where they’ve made an important discovery: Eight (Linnea Berthelsen), one of the other telekinetic kids from the Hawkins Lab experiments, with whom Eleven bonded in Season 2, is alive and being held there.
During a lull in the battle, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) steps through the membrane of the Upside Down to survey his quarry, where Joyce (Winona Ryder), Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and his original prey, Will (Noah Schnapp) — along with the remaining military officers and soldiers — seem to be no match for him. Vecna effortlessly extends his arms to turn their weapons against them, pushing fire back on the soldiers and pulling a pin on a grenade. He then levitates Will, and brings him to him, face to face. “Can you see them, William? Can you see the children?” he asks. “Do you know why I chose them to reshape the world? It’s because they are weak. Weak in body and mind.” He says this as the Demogorgons drag the kids Will and his friends had been trying to save into the Upside Down, where he’s already taken Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher). Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) helplessly watches from the escape tunnel as one child is sucked into the Upside Down through a wall, and Robin sees that all the kids in the truck are gone.
Vecna, taunting, calls the children “perfect vessels,” as he touches Will’s face almost gently. “And you, Will, you were the first,” he says. “And you broke so easily. You showed me what was possible, what I could achieve. Some minds, it turns out, simply do not belong in this world. They belong in mine.” He lets Will drop, and strides back into the Upside Down, confident that the Demogorgons will finish the job. But just as the massacre is set to recommence, Will remembers what Robin — to whom he’s felt bonded since realizing that she, too, is queer — had said to him earlier: that she’d always had all the answers within her, and she just needed to stop being scared of who she was Home movies begin to play in his mind. He remembers the first time he met Mike, who asked if he wanted to be friends; he remembers drawing things with crayons and showing them to a loving Joyce; he remembers building Castle Byers with Jonathan in woods near their home.
Noah Schnapp and Jamie Campbell Bower
Courtesy of Netflix
It’s then that Will accesses the powers he (and we!) didn’t know he has, stopping each Demogorgon in place before they kill Mike, Lucas and Robin. Will can see through their eyes, he realizes, and — as indicated through arm gestures — he snaps the Demos’ limbs, killing all of them. The final image of Volume 1 is Will raising his head, and wiping his nosebleed with his sleeve, as we’ve seen Eleven do a thousand times on “Stranger Things” — as he stares with purpose into the distance.
In a long interview with the Duffer brothers for Variety’s Oct. 15 cover story, Ross Duffer said, “We’ve been talking about Will having powers for as long as I can really remember.”
Below, the Duffers delve into what those powers are, the season’s opening flashback sequence, why the climax of “Sorcerer” (and that oner!) was “logistically the most difficult thing we ever did,” how they deployed Max, the return of Eight, the attack on the Wheeler house — and much, much more.
We have to start with Will. Will! Does he have Eleven’s powers? Or is it something different?
Ross Duffer: It’s different in that he’s able to channel Vecna’s powers. But they’re all related. Vecna and Eleven, their powers are similar. The powers aren’t within him. He’s able to channel these powers from Vecna and use it, sort of puppeteering.
Matt Duffer: He taps into the hive mind, and then he can manipulate anything within the hive. You’ll see how far he can take it as you continue to watch. But that’s how he’s able to manipulate the monster. So he can’t open a door, because the door is not part of the hive mind.
Is this something that he always had that Vecna identified, or did he get it because Vecna grabbed him?
Matt Duffer: He got it because he got hooked into the hive mind.
Ross Duffer: If he’s not close to the hive mind, he’s not able to access or tap it.
Matt Duffer: It’s proximity based.
Had he not been taken to the Upside Down…
Matt Duffer: Never would’ve happened. So it’s very different from Eleven in that regard.
And how long have you known that this was something that Will had within him that you were going to build to?
Ross Duffer: We’ve been talking about Will having powers for as long as I can really remember.
Matt Duffer: He had a dark version of it in Season 2 — he was connected to Vecna. He could see what he saw, but he didn’t realize that at the time he was able to tap into it in a way and use it against Vecna. That’s something he doesn’t learn till this season. It took us a while to build there, but it was something we always intended to do. The details of it were a little rough until we started working on it.
Noah Schnapp and Maya Hawke
Courtesy of Netflix
What do you think came together for him after the gay pep talk from Robin and what Mike said to him about being a sorcerer? Do you have that thought out, or was it just a feeling?
Ross Duffer: We knew we wanted him to access these powers this season. Then we began talking about why now, and why is he able to do it now. Some of it is mythology-based in terms of the hive mind’s closer than it’s ever been for him. But most of what we were talking about was how has Will changed. Throughout the seasons, he’s been a little more fearful than the others. He hasn’t been a leader. He hasn’t accepted himself in the way that some of our characters have. So I think it was really talking about if he really is able to at least start to accept himself for who he is, will that give him the kind of strength that he needs in order to access these powers? That’s really where Episode 4 — and really the arc of the first four episodes — led for him.
Why doesn’t Vecna kidnap or kill Will in that moment?
Matt Duffer: You’ll see as it goes on, but he completely underestimates Will. He perceives him in the way that so many others have in his life, which is as weak, as nothing, as incapable of achieving anything great. So he completely underestimates him in that moment. Whether that’s going to happen again, you’ll have to watch Volume 2.
The home movie that goes through Will’s mind: How long were you planning to do that sequence?
Ross Duffer: The original draft of Chapter 4 did not have the flashback footage in it. When we read it through, it’s the same exact storyline with Robin, but because it’s such an internal shift for Will, we needed to be able to show that visually. That’s when we came up with the idea of Robin mentioning that she’d found these old tapes. So that was the only different thing that we changed about her monologue, but it allowed us to visually represent what was going through Will’s mind. Once we did that, we felt like the ending finally had the emotional kick that we wanted.
How much work was it to find the super young Will, Mike and Jonathan?
Matt Duffer: I know we were really scared about whether we were going to be able to find someone or not. I mean, initially, obviously there were conversations about, Do we do face replacement? Do we do what we did with Will at the beginning of the season? Budgetarily, it was impossible. It’s just very expensive.
Ross Duffer: The beginning scene he’s referencing, we were able to model it after Noah at that age, but this is even a younger age. So you start to get into uncanny valley world. It would’ve been extremely expensive, and also look creepy.
Matt Duffer: It was really fun, too, to film that with those kids.
So let’s talk about that opening of the season. Did young Eleven in Season 4 give you the confidence to make young Will in that opening sequence for Season 5? How did you pull that off?
Matt Duffer: We’re so proud of it. That’s all Weta. We’ve never worked with Weta before, but Betsy [Patterson], our visual effects supervisor, when she brought them on, she was confident that they would be able to do it. Usually when we’re writing this stuff, we don’t worry too much, sometimes to our detriment, about how we’re going to pull certain things off. It just felt absolutely right to start with a flashback of Will, and then you just turn to Betsy and then ultimately Weta to do it.
We did take a lot of learnings from the Eleven stuff last year, but this was more challenging, because we’ve all seen Will or Noah at this exact age before. We saw this scene, the very beginning of it, in Season 1. So it was very important that it was hyper-real. It’s the first visual effects work that was done on the show. They just did incredibly detailed work and then just kept honing and honing and honing. Sometimes you can’t figure out what’s wrong. You’re just like, “That’s not quite…” — usually it’s the lighting — and just work on every shot to death.
How long had you known that that had happened to Will in the Upside Down, that he and Vecna had actually crossed paths?
Ross Duffer: That’s an idea we’ve had for a while. I can’t remember exactly when, but when we first had that thought, immediately we started talking about Season 5: “That’s where we have to start. We have to bring it back full circle.” It sets up the season the way we want it to, which is everything is going back to Season 1, and everything is coming full circle. We thought there wasn’t really a better way to do that than to go back and see what Will had experienced.
In some ways, Dustin seems like the only character who’s having a natural trauma response to everything they went through in Season 4. How’d you decide that he’s the one who’s going to be carrying this stuff for them?
Matt Duffer: Well, he was the closest to Eddie. So the two who are most impacted by the events of Season 4 would be him and Lucas. But at least Lucas is trying, desperately, to keep hope alive [about Max], because it hasn’t been extinguished at this point, although he’s sort of losing it when we see him at the top of Episode 1. But Dustin has lost Eddie, so he’s struggling to remain optimistic because of their friendship and because of what he feels is a need to continue carrying that torch. It felt like the most interesting way to explore grief was through him.
Ross Duffer: When we talked about it with the writers, even in Season 1 when Mike and Lucas get in a fight, Dustin’s the one that pulls everything together. He in a lot of ways is the heart of that group. So it immediately puts all of our characters on edge, and the audience hopefully, too.
Nell Fisher
Courtesy of Netflix
How long have you known that Holly Wheeler would be a major character this season?
Matt Duffer: That was a new idea. We did not know until we started working on Season 5, probably pretty early in the process.
Ross Duffer: I don’t even think it was in the pandemic. Because we had so long [of a break] that we had time to not only finish [writing] Season 4, but pitch a version of Season 5. I don’t think she was even in that. That was the big breakthrough, having shot Season 4, coming back and realizing the drive of these kids getting taken. Once we realized that, we got really excited about making Holly the focus of that new group of kids.
How did you approach casting Holly Wheeler?
Ross Duffer: If you watch the previous seasons, Holly barely talks at all. So we didn’t really have much of a character there. She was just a little kid. Even Season 1, when we’re filming her, it was basically whatever one of the young twins would do, we would just try to capture it in real time. So we didn’t really have a voice for her.In the initial scripts, Holly was a little shyer and a little more withdrawn. And then as we found Nell, who’s such a character…
Matt Duffer: And more of an extrovert.
Ross Duffer: …we started infusing Nell’s personality into Holly.
Matt Duffer: We were really nervous about it. It is not like she had to look identical to the twins who were playing Holly in the past, but she had to resemble them enough that you weren’t totally confused. But more important than that, they have to be an incredible actor.
I remember seeing the “Evil Dead Rise” trailer and seeing her. I had not seen the movie. I just saw her in the trailer and I was like, “That’s Holly.” But then I didn’t remember that. [Our casting director] Carmen [Cuba] found her, brought her to us, and I was like, “I knew this like six months ago.” That would’ve saved us a lot of time.
Ross Duffer: Carmen’s going to get annoyed you’re taking credit for this.
Matt Duffer: She always thinks I take too much credit for the casting.
Nell Fisher and Cara Buono
Courtesy of Netflix
Speaking of the Wheelers, with the mauling of Karen and Ted in Episode 2, when they’re trying to protect Holly, how did you decide to bring these characters to the front who have been just around since moment one, but have been oblivious?
Matt Duffer: Oblivious! One of the early ideas was we finally had to bring them into the fold. It was easy, because we could bring anybody in the fold. It was the final season. Karen would’ve moved them out of Hawkins, had she learned any of this earlier. Finally, none of that mattered.
We’ve always wanted an attack on the Wheeler house, and to give Karen a killer badass moment, have her face down one of these monsters. Cara and Nell bonded. They got really close, and we just had an incredibly fun time shooting what is a very violent sequence. And yeah, Karen’s tough. She miraculously survives.
How did you decide when and how to reveal where Max is, and what’s going on with her?
Matt Duffer: We knew we wanted to keep her out of it for the first couple episodes, and we knew she was going to end an episode. At some point, we thought Episode 3 felt like the right time.
Ross Duffer: From the end of Season 4 when we kept her in the coma, we knew she was trapped in Vecna’s mindscape, and we knew that was going to be part of her journey, at least for Season 5. But it finally clicked when we realized that Holly could be there as well, and then the other kids. That’s when her storyline really came to life.
Matt Duffer: I can’t tell you how many hours are spent in the writers’ room discussing the movie “The Cell,” the Jennifer Lopez/Tarsem movie. It’s such a great concept, because they enter the mind of a serial killer. It was the closest thing we could think of that parallels what we were doing. Our serial killer mindscape ends up being pretty different, but it’s probably why we ended up having a desert in there. A lot of desert sequences in “The Cell.”
So Vecna’s mindscape is that in-between world?
Ross Duffer: Yeah. Holly’s nicknamed it Camazotz.
Matt Duffer: The boys are always referencing Dungeons & Dragons, and Holly doesn’t play Dungeons & Dragons, so we thought it’d be interesting if she’s referencing something she’s into.
The wall: Do we find out what created it?
Matt Duffer: You find out pretty much everything, is what I’ll say.I mean, there are still some mysteries. We don’t explain everything, but the wall, certainly, you understand.
Linnea Berthelsen and Millie Bobby Brown in Season 2 of “Stranger Things”
Netflix/Courtesy Everett Collection
The reveal that Eight (Linnea Berthelsen) has been kept captive by the military was a big surprise, in part because you were bringing back a storyline that seemed to have been dropped and set on fire and run away from. What was your thinking there?
Ross Duffer: Yeah, that’s two-fold. We want when someone watches through the entire show, it doesn’t feel like we dropped a storyline or a thread. That it all connects. You see how everything fits together. And that was definitely a loose plot strand.
But also, we really like Linnea and we felt that that episode [in Season 2] just didn’t give her a chance to do what we know she’s capable of doing. So part of it was to put her back in and give her a moment. But we didn’t want to just do it to do it. As we were breaking the season, we realized that bringing her back really helped us with the Eleven storyline and how we wanted to wrap her story up. So there was a real reason to do it beyond just to not leave this dangling plot thread.
Matt Duffer: We were shooting Season 2 really, really fast, because we were trying to hit this Halloween deadline. And the first script we wrote just flat out didn’t work, and then we had one week left to rewrite. I just don’t think we ever nailed it, obviously. I always felt bad that we didn’t figure that out for Linnea. But we felt we had something special with Linnea, so we wanted to bring her back. I think she’s awesome in the season, so I’m pretty excited about that.
The long battle sequence at the end of Episode 4: How long did it take to plan the extended oner shot in the battle?
Matt Duffer: Forever. It wasn’t originally written that way. We wanted it to feel very immersive, like you were in the middle of it. Ross and I hadn’t done anything like that before. The finale’s insane, but that sequence was logistically the most difficult thing we ever did.
The whole battle?
Matt Duffer: The whole battle, but specifically that oner, because it involved obviously a lot of stunts and visual effects and actors, but then also children. It is stitched together [from several shots]. I don’t want people to get mad at us when we call it a “oner,” because it’s at night and you’re working with children and stunts. We could only shoot about two hours a night. So we divided it up into, I think, four chunks, and we thought we could accomplish within the time that we had one chunk per night.
Ross Duffer: It was definitely the hardest thing we’ve ever done ever in terms of filmmaking.
Finn Wolfhard
COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025
No one dies in Volume 1, not even Ted and Karen, who seemed like goners for a second there. Did you contemplate having any kind of big death in this part of the season?
Ross Duffer: Once we decided we knew we wanted to do the Will power stuff this season, we knew that that’s how we had to end Volume 1. So there’s the low point of all the kids being taken, but the high point of Will has these powers. That was always the discussion. Vecna taking these children was the low point we needed for the end of Volume 1.
Will Volume 2 get bloodier?
Matt Duffer: I’ve said this before: The show is not “Game of Thrones.” I’m hoping it surprises people. But there’s no Red Wedding, if that’s what you’re asking. That would be depressing.
When Will gets that image of the temple that Vecna doesn’t want him to see, he sees Holly trapped inside that structure. Is that where Holly is actually physically located in that moment, or is he seeing something in the future?
Ross Duffer: Do we answer this?
Matt Duffer: I think this is OK.
Ross Duffer: Yes. That’s where Holly is at the present moment.
Vecna gets a real glow up.
Ross Duffer: That’s one way to put it!
Well, he’s looking good after almost being killed at the end of Season 4. Will we find out where he went after that?
Matt Duffer: Yeah, there’s a backstory to all of that that is actually never revealed in the show. The idea of it was based a little bit on the original “Hellraiser,” although it’s different than that. But yeah, he retreated to lick his wounds. Nancy blew holes all through his body, so he more or less rebuilt his body into something stronger and hopefully cooler. But it was a challenge because we also wanted his new design to reflect the fact that he had been injured. That’s why we ultimately had to go full CG on his body was because you see holes throughout his body. It was figuring out that balance took a long time.
So Jamie Campbell Bower is in a motion-capture suit?
Matt Duffer: He was just in a leotard, basically. But the important thing is they match his movement. And his face is completely him in makeup. We don’t touch that at all. That’s fully Jamie.
Do we know yet what Vecna wants?
Ross Duffer: No.
Matt Duffer: Nothing good.
He says that the kids are the way he’s going to remake the world.
Matt Duffer: Right. What does that mean?
It’s safe to assume it’s not a nice world that he wants.
Matt Duffer: I mean, depends on your perspective, you know?
Sadie Sink and Caleb McLaughlin
Courtesy of Netflix
Will we be seeing more of Vecna’s memories in Volume 2?
Matt Duffer: Yes, that’s what we call our new Russia storyline, because it’s very few characters. They’re kind of isolated off on their own, Max and Holly. We’re very happy with how it integrates with the other storylines.
How much of all of that is real vs. a set?
Ross Duffer: The forest is real.
Matt Duffer: And the desert’s real. We went out to New Mexico to shoot any of the desert sequences. You’ll see more of them. The inside of the interior of the cave is a set build. That main outside of the cave is a set build right outside the forest. And the forest is the summertime set. That’s why we had to shoot some finale there when the leaves were green.
In “The First Shadow,” the prequel play that’s on Broadway and in the West End, there’s a reference to a cave in Nevada near an army base where a young Henry Creel first encountered something connected to the Upside Down. Is that the same cave?
Matt Duffer: Yeah. When we were working on the play with Kate Trefry, we had Henry’s backstory worked out. There was always a balance that we had to find in terms of how much we were going to put in the play. [The director] Stephen [Daldry] and [the produce] Sonia [Friedman] were always pushing for more and we were pushing back and saying, “Well, we have to wait to reveal that in the show.” You’ll see, especially as you reach the final episode, there’s more overlap with the play.
Ross Duffer: And, like, Max finds that “Oklahoma” poster, which people who haven’t seen the play are maybe like, “Why is Henry in ‘Oklahoma’?” But I think it’s nice for us to start to tie those two together.
Matt Duffer: But you absolutely do not have to have seen the play to understand. They’re Easter eggs more than anything.
Finally — and you may not want to touch this, so just going dive in — in the play, it felt like the real evil is the Mind Flayer. It’s what seduces Henry to accept what’s in the Upside Down into himself and ultimately what seems to have transformed him into Vecna once Eleven pushes him into the Upside Down. Are we barking up the right tree here?
Matt Duffer: You’re asking a question that will be answered in the final episode. The next spoiler talk we do, I’ll address it.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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