Stranger Things 2 Release Date, Trailer, Cast, And More News

Sean Astin (The Goonies) will play Bob Newby “a kind-hearted former nerd who went to high school with Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Hopper (David Harbour) and now manages the local Hawkins RadioShack.” Just the fact that there’s a RadioShack that is probably useful and profitable is a wonderful piece of 1984-appropriate detail. However, there’s apparently more to Bob and Joyce’s relationship than school days nostalgia. At the Fan2Sea Comic Con cruise, David Harbour revealed that Astin’s Bob is Joyce’s boyfriend; something that’s not exactly thrilling Harbour’s police chief Jim Hopper, who seemed to have some chemistry with Joyce in Season 1.

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Paul Reiser will play Dr. Owens, “a high-ranking member within the Department of Energy on a ‘clean-up’ assignment who is tasked with containing the events of last year.” Now, casting Paul Reiser in a role in an ’80s throwback is immediately going to bring comparisons to his role in Aliens, and according to Entertainment Weekly, that was the plan all along. “We want people to have those debates like, ‘Do you trust that guy or is he Burke?’” Ross Duffer said. “Paul was saying the reason James Cameron cast him is because he thought people would inherently trust him and it would be a twist.”

Reiser himself is keeping quiet on whether or not he’s a hero or villain in this. “To be honest, I’ve only read a few of the scripts so I still don’t know and I’m not sure they know,” he told EW. “I think part of what they were tickled by was, to whatever extent people know me from Aliens, they’re automatically going, ‘Oh this guy is no good.’ I don’t know where they’re going with it but it’s a fun thing to play.”

Linnea Berthelsen is Roman, “an emotionally damaged, magnetic young woman who suffered a great loss as a child. Although she does not live in Hawkins, she is mysteriously connected to the supernatural events at the lab.” Is that “great loss” linked to The Upside Down? Who knows. Probably!

Shortly after severing ties with Adult Swim in a very public and acrimonious way—accusing the network of alleged misogyny and supporting shows that appeal to alt-right, white nationalism—Variety reports that Brian Gelman will be making the jump to Netflix by joining Stranger Things season 2.