Stranger Things Star Joe Keery Was Surprised by His Season 1 Face Turn

Joe Keery has some exciting projects in the works, including Ryan Reynolds’ Free Guy and the new thriller Spree, but it’s Stranger Things that put the actor on the map. Keery is known for playing the lovable Steve Harrington, but if you remember the show’s start, Steve wasn’t always a fan-favorite. At the beginning of the series, Steve was your average popular jerk, but he came around by the end of season one. In a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Keery talked about his character’s “face turn” and explained why it surprised him.

“No, not really,” Keery revealed when asked if he knew about Steve’s change of heart from the beginning of filming. “That was kind of developed along the way during shooting. I had gotten maybe six episodes, and even those six changed as we were shooting. So, I was a day player and just living down in Atlanta. Luckily enough, they wrote some more stuff for me to do.”

He added, “It’s really fun to watch some emotional growth from a character. It’s fun to go somewhere, and the brothers really allowed me to do that. The thing to really look for in any character is an arc. I mean, that’s why I really liked Spree. There’s a real arc to the character. And so, yeah, it just really exceeded my expectations in every way.”

Recently, Keery also talked to Netflix Queue about the third season of Stranger Things and shared his thoughts on the big coming out scene between Steve and Robin (Maya Hawke).

“I don’t know about emotional,” Keery explained. “It was rewarding to get to that final sequence in the midst of all this crazy supernatural shit that’s going on — to do a scene that felt real and pretty honest. The action stuff is really fun, but it’s always nice when you get a two- or three-page scene to do in full, especially on a show with so many characters.”

Back in February, Stranger Things released a teaser that showed Jim Hopper (David Harbour) alive. Now that we know the fate of Hop, another big question is how long the beloved Netflix series will last. Recently, a casting notice alluded to the fact that the series will at least have a fifth season after the upcoming fourth. It’s also been reported that the fourth season could have nine episodes instead of the usual eight, which is what they did during the series’ second season.

The first three seasons of Stranger Things are streaming on Netflix.