The creators of “Stranger Things” had something big to confess — they regret killing off some of the characters.
In a recent interview, Ross and Matt Duffer said they felt gutted about killing several people in the show, but especially this one character from the new season.
Season 4, Volume 1 introduces Chrissy Cunningham, played by Grace Van Dien (“Charlie Says”), who is a cheerleader and girlfriend of basketball captain Jason Carver.
At first glance, her character seems unremarkable, until a layered scene with Eddie “the Freak” Munson, the metalhead from the show’s Dungeons & Dragons group “The Hellfire Club,” played by Joseph Quinn.
Chrissy was having waking nightmares, so she went to Eddie for help. The two sat at a picnic table, getting to know each other better. She later went with Eddie to his trailer, where the show’s spellcasting villain bent and snapped all her bones like a twig.
Turns out, the creators of the show are mourning Chrissy’s death.
“We always have those moments (of ‘What have we done?)’” Matt Duffer told TVLine. “We shot the quote-unquote drug-deal scene in the woods pretty late, actually, into shooting.” Ross Duffer added that they “had already killed Chrissy when we shot that.”
They noticed the chemistry between Van Dien and Quinn that made that scene special.
“The scene came alive in a way that was just so beautiful,” Matt Duffer said. “And so much of that was Joe and Grace.
“It was just one of those fortunate scenes where we were able to have two cameras rolling capturing them simultaneously,” he continued. “Joe was doing a lot of stuff kinda spontaneously, and we were getting these amazing reactions from Grace.”
But the creators have been down this road before “when we killed Bob in Season 2,” said Matt Duffer. “I didn’t want to do that. We had fallen in love with both the character and Sean Astin. And Sean didn’t want to die. Winona Ryder didn’t want him to die.”
“But we’ll find something else to do with Grace, something else to do with Sean.”
Netflix released the first seven episodes of Season 4 on May 27, with the final two following on July 1.