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Will Byers and Eleven are arguably the two most important kids in Stranger Things thanks to their ties to the Upside Down and the villainous Vecna. But co-creator Matt Duffer now tells SFX that another character will step up to the plate in Stranger Things season 5: Holly Wheeler, the younger sister of Mike and Nancy Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard and Natalia Dyer, respectively).
Played by twins Anniston and Tinsley Price, Holly Wheeler has done a lot of growing up over the course of the show's four seasons, but according to Matt Duffer, in an interview alongside his brother and co-creator Ross Duffer, it's Holly's youth that makes her the right supporting character to bump up to the main cast.
"Once you see the full season, you'll have a better understanding of why it was so important to add her to the cast," Duffer explains. "One of the reasons was, we just wanted to recapture some of the feeling of season one, and some of that you can't recapture unless you have kids, because our kids are not kids any more. They're not close to being kids any more. So it was really fun to add Holly and her classmates into the show, because it allowed us to recapture some of that feeling."
Duffer goes on to elaborate that they started making changes to their original outline as far back as season 2, building the show's mythos and planning out where certain characters would end up by the end of the show. Even the upcoming final season underwent some adjustments during development.
"[Season 2] was really when we saw that the show was a success and that it would probably go on for a few seasons. That's when we started to really break down the mythology and start to roughly plan it out," he says. "But even then, things change as you make discoveries each season. So a lot of big ideas were there, but even something like Holly [Wheeler] being a centrepiece of this season, that was a discovery as we were breaking season five. So you always want to allow room for things to change and evolve and grow."
Stranger Things season 5 will be released in three parts: Part 1: November 26, 2025; Part 2: Christmas; Finale: New Year's Day. For more, check out our picks for the best shows on Netflix and best movies on Netflix.
