When Stranger Things debuted on Netflix last summer, it became an instant smash hit, spawning a mini-revival of E.T.-era aesthetics and a string of viral memes, 225 reports in its October cover story.
The show feels like the Stephen King novel he never wrote and the Steven Spielberg movie he never directed. And if you scroll through the show’s cast list on IMDb, you don’t have to go too far down to find two Louisiana actors who have left their mark on the show.
Joe Chrest, a West Virginia-born actor who earned a master’s degree in theatre performance from LSU, stars as the young protagonist’s aloof father, Ted Wheeler, and appears in 12 of the shows first 17 episodes, spanning two seasons. Peyton Wich, a New Orleans-based teen actor, appeared in six of season one’s eight episodes as the schoolyard bully, Troy.
It’s rare for actors to receive hard copies of screenplays today, and last spring when Chrest was emailed a script for the first episode in the second season, the file sat in his inbox as an unopened attachment for a couple of days.
What if it doesn’t live up to season one? he thought.
“Pretty much every fan has their ideas of where Stranger Things should go with this next season,” says Chrest, who not only appears in blockbusters like The Hunger Games: Mockingjay but teaches acting to a new and hyper-creative generation here in Baton Rouge. “It’s like creative armchair quarterbacking. Everyone has iPhones and video-editing apps, so everybody is like an armchair filmmaker these days. Which is cool; it’s just different.”
