Stranger Things stars Winona Ryder, David Harbour and Brett Gelman go an adventurous ride in Russia in Part 1 of Stranger Things season 4.

Shadow and Act spoke with the trio ahead of the season premiere in which they talked about the show’s rapidly expanding scope, the Russia storyline and more.

As the show ages, it has been interesting to see the young cast age along with it in real-time, something that Rider says works well with the younger actors, especially as the show goes deeper and darker with time.

“Things like that can either work or go terribly wrong,” she joked. “And we just scored with [an] incredible cast..these kids that we’ve worked with for seven years now. I think what really makes everything– like the scale…the accelerated, unthinkable stuff that’s going on…there’s always like heart and love in it. That is what is driving all of the characters at the end of the day, and I really love that they put that in and that that has translated for the audience.”

Though season 3 sort of teased it could be the end for Hopper, audiences have quickly learned that their favorite sheriff is not gone, but is actually held captive. This storyline has allowed Harbour to dig into something that hasn’t really been explored with the character before. We’ve seen him be a badass before, but not like this.

“I mean, I really relished [in] it,” he said of his work this season. “He [Hopper] had hit the limitations of who he was as a dad, as a cop and as a man. He was like on this sofa and he was like eating chips, yelling at his kids and fighting with everyone. The great thing about season 3 was that he gets to reveal through this letter what he’s really going through. And then, we sort of forced him down this rabbit hole of the most dramatic change he’s ever been through in his life. So in that way, it allowed us to peel back the onion on him and to see him at his most brutal and also to reawaken, moving forward as we sprint towards the end, this warrior that we’ve always known he was and we sort of seen glimpses up. But he really is like a warrior and he has a brutality inside him that may be necessary to truly confront the upside down and survive.”

And for Gelman, he was totally in for the adventure that Murray and Joyce go on in search of Hopper.

“It’s amazing…I mean, it was really like a childhood dream to get to like be in an action-comedy, which is really like the role that Murray and Joyce take,” he told us. “[And] more specifically, to get to be like an action-comedy duo with Winona to go and save David was just amazing. It was totally like why I want to do this. it was harkening back to like Indiana Jones and Return of the Jedi….these movies that implanted in me a real passion to want to do this in the first place. So to get to do that and then be funny in the context of this really high-stakes situation with my hero here was insane.”

Stranger Things season 4, Part 1 drops on Netflix this Friday.

Watch the full cast interviews, including Millie Bobby Brown, Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Sadie Sink and more, below:

Brett Gelman

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