Guide to ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Cast & Characters

Few shows have had the cultural impact of Netflix’s breakout hit, Stranger Things. Created by the Duffer Brothers (Matt and Ross Duffer), the show has become one of the hottest franchises in science fiction since Season 1 debuted in 2016.

From the first expedition into the show’s now-infamous shadow dimension, the Upside-Down, to the shocking finale of Season 4, there’s no denying that Stranger Things has reached popular parity with iconic sci-fi movies and TV shows like The Matrix, Lost and The Walking Dead, and a lot of that has to do with the cast.

The show largely follows a pack of ordinary kids from a small town called Hawkins, Indiana, and the “kids from Stranger Things” became household names nearly overnight following the premiere. Stranger Things also took other notable cast members’ fame to new heights, including Millie Bobby Brown, David Harbour and Joe Keery.

The show is now in its fifth and final season, which premiered on Nov. 26, 2025, and will include two separate three-episode releases (the second set comes out on Christmas Day) and a series finale released on December 31. That means there’s a lot to catch up on, and with so many memorable major characters, we thought it would be good to drop this quick refresher on the complete Stranger Things cast and characters.

Don’t forget: You can watch Stranger Things right on DIRECTV by connecting your Netflix account. Get started today!

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‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Full Cast & Characters

Here’s your complete guide to all of the major characters from Stranger Things Season 5.

SPOILER ALERT: Major spoilers for Stranger Things Seasons 1-4 below.

Returning Cast & Characters of Stranger Things Season 5

Millie Bobby Brown as Eleven/Jane Hopper

Known for: Enola Holmes, Godzilla: King of Monsters, The Electric State

Stranger Things was Millie Bobbie Brown’s breakout role. Her portrayal of Eleven, a mysterious young girl who possesses extraordinarily powerful telepathic and psychokinetic powers and harbors a deep love of Eggo waffles, thrust her into the public spotlight after the show became a runaway success for Netflix. The show remains one of the platform’s most watched to date.

Eleven is one of the most pivotal characters to the Stranger Things story. She serves as both the bridge between the real world and the Upside-Down and the most potent weapon humanity has to fight its denizens. The character’s arc also explores deep and emotional themes around belonging, family, trauma, duty, power and sacrifice.

We’re introduced to her in the first season, when Mike, Lucas and Dustin meet her while searching for the missing fourth member of the “the Party,” Will. El’s powers are pivotal in helping the boys understand the Upside-Down, a corrupted alternate dimension and pivotal plot point, and defeating the Demogorgon, which had been hunting Hawkins residents throughout the season.

Eleven is presumed dead at the end of Season 1, but it’s revealed that she was actually found by Hawkins police chief Hopper, who was now in the know about the Upside-Down and determined to keep her safe from recapture by agents of the lab she escaped from.

Season 2 dives deeper into Eleven’s story and powers. While hiding in Hopper’s remote cabin, she starts to exert some control over her abilities — including remote listening and telekinesis — and learns to speak better. Eventually, she grows restless, fights with Hopper over his protectiveness and runs away to locate her birth mother, who she learns about through records taken from Dr. Brenner, the Hawkins National Laboratory director. Brenner, she learns, abducted her at birth to be experimented on in a secret government program similar to the infamous, real-life Project MKULTRA experiments of the 1950s and 60s. When her mother tried to storm the lab and rescue her, Brenner attempted to wipe her mind using high-powered electric shocks, rendering her nearly catatonic for life.

Eleven eventually learns she has a “sister,” another child who was taken by Brenner’s program, and tracks her to learn more about her past. The other girl, Kali, teaches her to use her anger to more effectively channel her powers. Eventually, Eleven returns to Hawkins to rescue the Party as they attempt to close a gate to the Upside-Down in the Hawkins lab. She uses her powers to seal it.

Season 3 opens with Eleven and Mike dating, to Hopper’s extreme displeasure. Hopper and Eleven come into conflict due to the situation, while Eleven and Mike’s relationship begins to experience difficulties after Eleven gets jealous of Mike wanting to spend more time with the other boys in the Party. She becomes closer with Max and the two use her powers to eavesdrop on others as a game during a sleepover. This reveals that something is wrong with Max’s stepbrother, Billy, and when they investigate, they find that he’s been corrupted by a powerful denizen of the Upside-Down, which the Party dubs the Mind Flayer. The Party is later attacked by the Mind Flayer, and Eleven is both wounded and loses her powers as a result of the injury. The Party later defeats the Mind Flayer at the local mall, but at the apparent cost of both Billy’s and, presumably, Hopper’s lives. Eleven is taken in by the Byers family.

In Season 4, Eleven and the Byers move to California. Eleven struggles to cope with both the loss of her powers and the change of scenery, where she is subjected to harassment and bullying by older girls. She assaults one of them in a rage and is arrested. That puts her back on the government’s radar, and she is transferred to government custody once again. Brenner, now in the know about the Upside-Down, is running a new program with another researcher, Dr. Owen, designed to restore Eleven’s powers, and when it begins to work, she tentatively cooperates with them. We learn that Eleven is part of the reason that the Upside-Down and its sinister big bad, Vecna, who has been terrorizing Hawkins, was created in the first place, and that it now poses a threat to the entire world. Eleven returns to Hawkins to battle Vecna and save Max, who he is stalking and attempting to kill, but the season ends with Max briefly dying and ending up broken, blind and comatose, while the Upside-Down appears to begin bleeding over into the real world.

Finn Wolfhard as Mike Wheeler

Known for: It, Ghostbusters: Afterlife

Mike is the de facto leader of the Party. He is a kind, brave and dedicated friend who acts as the heart and moral center of his group, driven by a strong sense of responsibility and protectiveness over his friends. Mike, like most of his friends, loves playing the popular roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons, which is used a key and creative plot device throughout the series.

Mike is the first character to encounter Eleven while searching for Will Byers in Season 1, and their relationship as first friends, then romantic partners is one of the core emotional storylines of the series, used to show the characters’ progression from adolescence to young adulthood and all of the challenges that come along with that transition. That’s all happening while Mike, Eleven and the other characters carry the literal fate of the world of their shoulders, and their typical teenage on-and-off-again relationship dynamic often leads to situations that split elements of the Party apart before bringing them back together again to face the newest threat from the Upside-Down.

In Season 4, when Eleven is recaptured by the government, Mike leads Will, Jonathan and the fan-favorite stoner/surfer/pizza cook Argyle on a desperate mission to spring her free and save their friends in Hawkins from the Upside-Down’s greatest threat to date, Vecna. Mike’s admission of love for Eleven during their showdown with the villain allows her to overpower him and save the day once more, but not without another steep cost.

Gaten Matarazzo as Dustin Henderson

Known for: Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, The Angry Birds Movie 2

A fan-favorite since the series debut, Dustin is another core member of the Party and indisputably the wittiest, nerdiest and most humorous member of the group. Dustin’s character is equal parts crucial, clutch problem-solver and comedic relief, which is most notably on display when he’s paired up with Steve Harrington in the later seasons. He’s also a brave and compassionate kid, who, like Mike, is willing to put everything on the line to protect his friends and refuses to leave anyone behind.

Matarazzo’s Dustin has become iconic for being the most likely character to be at the center of some of the series’ most memorably funny scenes, especially his reluctant vocal performance of the theme from The Never-Ending Story for his girlfriend Suzie in Season 4.

In Season 1, Dustin is the first of the group to clue into the fact that they might be dealing with actual monsters from an actual alternate dimension in Hawkins as they search for Will. In Season 2, he accidentally adopts and tries to raise a baby monster from the Upside-Down as a pet, which grows into the biggest threat from that season, one of the Demo-dogs. Season 2 is also when Dustin begins to team up with Steve, as sort of a rebound after his crush, Max, ends up with Lucas.

Season 3 and 4 contain some of the most iconic Dustin scenes in the series. This is when he teams up with Steve and Robin to infiltrate a clandestine Soviet Russian operation experimenting with a portal to the Upside-Down underneath the local Starcourt Mall, meets Suzie and develops his bond with another fan-favorite character, the heavy metal rocker Eddie Munson. His friendship with Eddie is also sets up one of the most emotional moments of Season 4, when he is forced to helplessly watch as Eddie sacrifices himself and is killed by Upside-Down monsters to allow him to escape.

Caleb McLaughlin as Lucas Sinclair

Known for: High Flying Bird, The New Edition Story

Lucas is another core Party member, often acting as a counterweight to some of the other members’ grand plans and improbable strategies for battling the denizens of the Upside-Down. He’s the lens through which a normal, more grounded person might react to an invasion of otherworldly monsters from another dimension in their town.

Lucas’s character is also used to explore themes around loyalty, fitting in and coming of age, and his most important arcs so far have been his relationships with Max Mayfield, who he becomes romantically involved with during Season 2, and with his friend group’s dynamics: He’s the most likely of the crew to seek popularity or normalcy at the Party’s expense.

In Season 4, while his friends are still playing D&D and joining Eddie’s Hellfire Club, Lucas has instead joined the high school basketball team and is trying to endear himself to the team’s star players, often folding to peer pressure to that end. By the end of the season, he’s found himself in too deep as the basketball team members set out to hunt down, capture and possibly kill Eddie, who the local adults have accused on causing all of the Upside-Down-related happenings through Satanic rituals — a callback to the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s, in which both heavy metal music and Dungeons & Dragons featured prominently.

Once he realizes Max is Vecna’s latest quarry and that her life is in danger, he bucks the popularity act and rushes to her side to battle the Upside-Down’s big baddie. This sets the stage for what is arguably the heaviest scene in the series yet: Lucas physically takes on his former basketball friends on his own, beating them back as they try to stop him from helping Max, and then cradling Max as she fights for her life after Vecna’s assault.

Noah Schnapp as Will Byers

Known for: Stranger Things, The Peanuts Movie

Will kicks the series off when he goes missing after leaving Mike’s house to return home on his bike after a D&D game. Turns out, he was abducted by a Demogorgon from the Upside-Down, becoming the first and most important victim of the Upside-Down’s denizens in the series.

In Season 1, Will is a depicted as a much more sensitive and whimsical boy than the other members of the Party, but his abduction into the Upside-Down and the trauma and scars it leaves him with, both mental and physical, transform him into one of the series’ most emotionally deep characters by Season 4.

Will also learns that people in the Upside-Down can communicate with people in the real world by manipulating energy. Once he is rescued, it becomes clear that the Upside-Down is not done with him: He begins experiencing hallucinations of impending disaster and Upside-Down monsters, and in Season 2, it’s revealed that he’s become possessed by the Mind Flayer. Despite being apparently purged of the infection, Will remains sensitive to the forces of the Upside-Down in Season 3, showing that the real-world residents don’t truly understand how to deal with the sinister dimension’s threats.

Will is also the source of another deeply emotional scene in Season 4 when it’s revealed that he has strong romantic feelings for Mike but doesn’t feel like he can be honest about them or that they would be reciprocated.

Sadie Sink as Max Mayfield

Known for: The Whale

Sadie Sink’s Max Mayfield was introduced in Season 2 and has since become both a core member of the Party and the subject of one of the most important plot points of Season 5: Will she recover, and how will that impact her character as the only known survivor of one of Vecna’s psychic attacks?

Max moves to Hawkins with her arrogant and abusive stepbrother, Billy, in Season 2 and catches the attention of the Party when she starts crushing their high scores on a game in the local arcade. Max becomes the only other core female member of the Party besides Eleven, enters a relationship with Lucas and helps the group fight against the Upside-Down’s creeping influence.

Max’s character deepens in Season 3, when the Mind Flayer begins hunting Eleven and the Party, possessing Billy and other Hawkins residents as part of its strategy. She also forms a closer bond with Eleven, helping her navigate “boys” and her relationship with Mike. At the end of Season 3, a possessed Billy regains his senses and sacrifices himself to defeat the Mind Flayer, leaving Max with deep post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor’s guilt. This event opens her up to being targeted by Vecna — who uses the vulnerabilities of emotionally unstable, insecure or traumatized people against them to make his kills — in Season 4, allowing him to briefly kill her and open up multiple portals to the Upside-Down across Hawkins before Eleven revives her. Max, though alive, remains in a coma entering Season 5.

Priah Ferguson as Erica Sinclair

Known for: Hamster & Gretel, My Dad the Bounty Hunter

Erica is Lucas’ sassy, sarcastic younger sister. A peripheral character mostly used for comedic relief in the earlier seasons, an older Erica become a more central character and de facto Party member by Season 4, helping them fight the Upside-Down due to her resourcefulness and clever, quick thinking.

She first shows her previously unrecognized prowess by helping Dustin, Steve and Robin infiltrate the Soviet lab under the Starcourt Mall by crawling through the building’s ventwork, and in Season 4, she has joined the Hellfire Club along with the rest of the Party and acts as a lookout as they fight Vecna.

David Harbour as Jim Hopper

Known for: Thunderbolts*: The New Avengers, Hellboy, Black Widow, Violent Night

If it seems like David Harbour is everywhere in film right now, it’s because he is: His breakout role as Jim Hopper, the disillusioned, alcoholic police chief of Hawkins, thrust him into the public spotlight, leading to major roles or appearances in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (as the Red Guardian) and other major films.

Initially, Hopper is portrayed as a gruff, out-of-touch local police officer, but once he begins to investigate Will’s disappearance and meets Eleven, his character undergoes one of the most notable and striking transformations of the series, making him a major fan-favorite.

Hopper is haunted by past trauma and grief from his time serving in the Vietnam War and the death of his daughter, Sara, which was directly related to his own Agent Orange exposure during the war. This led him into a downward spiral of isolation and substance abuse. During the first season, Hopper becomes key to finding and rescuing Will Byers, and he forms a surrogate father-daughter bond with Eleven, similar to that of Joel and Ellie in HBO’s The Last of Us. This dynamic lets him begin rebuilding his life and emotional wellbeing, and he also begins developing romantic feelings for Joyce Byers, Will’s mom.

Hopper’s biggest moment comes at the end of Season 3, when he apparently sacrifices his own life to close a portal to the Upside-Down by overloading the Soviet energy-boring device that kept it open. Turns out, he actually escaped through the portal prior to the explosion and ended up imprisoned in Soviet Russia, where he fought off a captive Demogorgon before being rescued by Joyce and Murray — but not before destroying Soviet experiments attempting to weaponize captured creatures from the Upside-Down.

At the end of Season 4, he reunites with Eleven and the rest of the cast as the battle for Hawkins looms.

Winona Ryder as Joyce Byers

Known for: Little Women, Alien: Resurrection, Dracula, Beetlejuice

Stranger Things’ top-billed cast member, Wynona Ryder plays Joyce Byers, Will and Jonathan’s protective, dedicated and emotionally intense single mother. Joyce’s character, like Hopper’s, also undergoes a drastic transformation as the series progresses. She’s unwilling to accept that her son may never be found in Season 1 and becomes pivotal to realizing that stranger things may be afoot.

Joyce morphs from a frantic, overwhelmed single mom into a legitimate warrior in the battle against the Upside-Down, helping the Party infiltrate the Hawkins lab, going toe-to-toe with the Mind Flayer as she seeks to purge its influence from Will and even sneaking into Soviet Russia to rescue Hopper from captivity.

Natalia Dyer as Nancy Wheeler

Known for: Based on a True Story; Yes, God, Yes; Velvet Buzzsaw; Things Heard & Seen

Mike’s older sister, Nancy is initially portrayed as a typical high school teenager: She’s smart and studious but also very concerned about her social status and relationships. In Season 1, she’s dating Steve Harrington, whose character at the time also fit the typical “high school sports jock” persona but becomes more concerned with the strange happenings in Hawkins once her friend Barb goes missing, too.

Over the course of the series, Nancy transforms into a seasoned investigator. In Season 1, she teams up with Jonathan Byers to pursue their mutual interest in finding missing persons close to them. The pair form a romantic bond, and they reluctantly ally with Steve to fight the Demogorgon.

In later seasons, she and Jonathan work as reporters for the local paper and team up with Murray, a local conspiracy theorist whose theories are often pretty dead-on, to investigate the Hawkins lab and the supernatural events associated with it. (Bauman will also return for Season 5.) During this time, Nancy’s character is also used to explore themes around transitioning to adulthood, especially in the workplace from a women’s point of view.

By Season 4, along with Steve and Robin, Nancy has become a fighter in the fight against the Upside-Down, often actively engaging in physical combat with its denizens.

Charlie Heaton as Jonathan Byers

Known for: As You Are, The New Mutants

Jonathan is Joyce’s eldest son and Will’s brother. Joyce, Will and Jonathan were abandoned by the boys’ father and form a tight-knit family unit, with Joyce and Jonathan both fiercely protective of Will.

Jonathan is a quiet, reclusive and socially awkward high schooler, and is even subjected to bullying at the hands of Steve prior to allying with him to fight Upside-Down monsters while searching for Will. Jonathan and Nancy form a close personal and romantic bond as they investigate Barb and Will’s disappearances, then begin working together as an investigative journalism team to investigate the happenings around Hawkins.

By Season 4, Jonathan’s trauma has caught up with him, and he’s entered more of a grungy/stoner phase after moving to California. Nonetheless, he jumps back into action, helping Will and Mike rescue Eleven in his friend Argyle’s pizza delivery van. He’s reunited with Steve and Nancy at the end of season.

Joe Keery as Steve Harrington

Known for: Free Guy, Fargo

Another breakout role for a Stranger Things cast member, Joe Keery’s bully-turned-protector Steve Harrington remains one of the most beloved characters in the series.

Initially positioned as the classic star basketball player, social alpha and high school bully that’s a fixture in many a high school drama, Steve is another character that undergoes a drastic character transformation as the series progresses. He starts out as Nancy’s boyfriend, but that ends quickly when she becomes preoccupied with finding Barb. He eventually teams up with her and Jonathan, facing a Demogorgon head on with a nail-studded baseball bat.

In subsequent seasons, Steve, now graduated, realizes that his stature and popularity in high school don’t exactly translate as cleanly to the adult world. He begins working at a local ice cream shop in the mall, where he meets Robin Buckley, and assumes a new role as a protector, guardian and, sometimes, babysitter, to the younger Party members. His relationships with Dustin and Robin, in particular, serve as some of the series’ most memorable inter-character dynamics.

By Season 4, Steve has taken on sort of Daryl Dixon from The Walking Dead vibe, with a dedicated fan following. He’s consistently stepped up to become a key player, often directly engaging the Upside-Down monsters in hand-to-hand combat and becoming braver and more mature as the series progresses. At the end of the Season 4, he and Nancy lead a mission into the Upside-Down to attempt to kill Vecna, and the pair is reunited with Jonathan at the end.

Maya Hawke as Robin Buckley

Known for: Inside Out 2, Maestro, Do Revenge

Maya Hawke, the daughter of acclaimed actor Ethan Hawke, made her Stranger Things debut in Season 3 as Robin Buckley, Steve’s quirky, sarcastic ice cream shop coworker.

Steve and Robin were classmates, but not exactly friendly acquaintances in high school, and that dynamic creates plenty of comedic tension between the two as they are forced to work together. Robin is highly intelligent, and she helps Dustin and Steve decipher a Soviet code to figure out that there’s a secret Russian lab under the mall. One of the series’ most memorable scenes involves she and Steve being captured by the Russians and injected with truth serum — an homage to the classic 90s spy comedy starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, True Lies.

By Season 4, Robin’s a core team member and adept investigator, accompanying Steve and Nancy on their mission into the Upside-Down to take out Vecna’s physical form.

Jamie Campbell Bower as Vecna/Henry Creel/One

Known for: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, The Twilight Saga, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones

The Big Bad himself: Vecna is the main antagonist of Stranger Things. Vecna’s existence as the puppeteer (quite literally) behind all of the Upside-Down-related happenings in Hawkins throughout the series isn’t revealed until Season 4, but his emergence introduced us to one of the most creative, sinister and instantly iconic villains in science fiction history. He’s a complete package homage to the best villains in sci-fi over the last few decades, equal parts Voldemort, The Terminator, Predator and Xenomorph, with a healthy scoop of Darth Vader and Agent Smith.

Vecna’s true identity is Henry Creel, a boy born in Nevada who accidentally stumbled into an alternate dimension one day, where he gained powerful psychic abilities. Creel’s early life was filled with trauma, which made him a jaded and pessimistic person. He began using his powers to psychologically torment his family members, eventually murdering his mother and having it pinned on his father. He was taken to Hawkins lab by Brenner where he became known as “Number One,” the first subject of the program that Eleven would eventually be placed in. (That’s the same way Eleven got her name, by the way.)

Creel remained nihilistic, and once he met Eleven and realized how powerful she was, he helped her cultivate her abilities with the end goal of convincing her to help him annihilate humanity. After Creel massacred the other children in the program, Eleven denied his offer to form an alliance and instead tried to use her powers to kill him but only succeeded in banishing him to the Upside-Down through a rift in reality. There, he became physically warped and even more psychologically unhinged.

Vecna bides his time and begins to look for ways to invade the real world from the Upside-Down, where he’s now taken control of the native creatures and become their hive-mind of sorts. In Season 4, it’s revealed he has been behind everything the whole time and that he’s now trying to open a massive gate between dimensions by using people’s trauma and emotional instability to murder them. At the end of the season, he appears to have partially succeeded, though he is believed to be badly wound and now missing in action.

New Characters in ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5

Here’s a look at some of the new cast members joining Stranger Things for the final season:

Nell Fisher as Holly Wheeler
Known for: Evil Dead Rise

Nell Fisher will play an older Holly Wheeler, the younger sister of Mike and Nancy, who will play a larger role in Season 5.

Jake Connelly as Derek Turnbow
Known for: Between the Silence

Connelly will play Derek, a very rude classmate of Mike and Nancy’s younger sister, Holly Wheeler.

Linda Hamilton as Dr. Kay
Known for: The Terminator, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Terminator: Dark Fate

Sarah Conner, of Terminator fame, herself, Linda Hamilton, will step into the late Dr. Brenner’s role as the director of the Hawkins lab.

Alex Breaux as Lt. Robert Akers
Known for:American Primeval, Waco: The Aftermath

Alex Breaux will play Lt. Akers, Dr. Kay’s right-hand man.

How Old Are The Kids From ‘Stranger Things’ Now and How Old Were They When the Show Started?

The actors and actresses who play the Stranger Things kids might play teenagers on the show, but they’re all a lot older than that in real life. Most of them got their start on the show when they were just preteens, however!

Here’s how old the main younger cast members of Stranger Things Season 5 were when they started the series and how old they all are now:

Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven): Millie was 12 when Stranger Things Season 1 was filmed, and she’s now 21 years old in real life.

Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler): Finn was 13 when the show premiered, and he’s 22 now.

Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin Henderson): Gaten was also 13 when the show started and 22 now.

Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair): Caleb was 14 years old when Season 1 wrapped, and he’s now 23.

Noah Schnapp (Will Byers): Noah was 11 while filming Season 1, and he’s now 20.

Sadie Sink (Max Mayfield): Sadie was 14 when she started working on Stranger Things. Since her character Max didn’t show up until the second season, she was a bit older than the rest of the kids when she got the gig. Like, McLaughlin, she’s now 23.

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