Stranger Things season five will jump ahead in time to address actors’ ages

Some of the series’ stars are conspicuously older than the teens they play on TV

The co-creator of Stranger Things has confirmed there will be time-jump ahead of the Netflix hit’s fifth and final season.

Ross Duffer, who created the series alongside his brother, has said they would have liked to film the fourth and fifth seasons “back to back” in order to keep up with how quickly the show’s stars are out-aging the characters they play, but it wasn’t “feasible”.

“I’m sure we will do a time jump,” Duffer told TVLine.

Only a few months are meant to have passed between the end of season three and the start of season four, which is set in the summer of 1986. Production was postponed by the pandemic, and ultimately, the seasons debuted nearly three years apart.

Covid-related delays affected most Hollywood series, but the young cast of Stranger Things was just the right age for growth spurts. Nineteen-year-old Finn Wolfhard plays high school freshman Mike Wheeler, but the actor looks tall enough to play professional basketball. Noah Schnapp, still only 17, suddenly towers above his TV mom played by Winona Ryder.

Sadie Sink and Caleb McLaughlin, who play Max and Lucas, are both 20 years old. And Joe Keery, the actor who plays recent high school grad Steve Harrington, recently celebrated his thirtieth birthday.

Ross didn’t expand on the details of the time jump. In fact, he said the team is still finishing the last two episodes of season four, which are set to premiere on 1 July.

He described those episodes, which have a combined runtime of four hours, as “massive”.

“So these are all discussions we’re going to have with our writers when we start the room up”, Ross said.

Stranger Things is on Netflix now.