The Hollywood Reporter ran an interview with Stranger Things creators the Duffer Brothers this morning, checking in on the bros now that news has cooled down following the announcement of the show’s renewal for a 9-episode second season.
If you recall, over a month after the series had premiered and prompted the Internet to hyper-analyze and/or listicle-ize every aspect of it, Netflix still hadn’t announced the series’ renewal, and people were starting to get as tense as Barb’s super 80s rigor mortis. But from what’s revealed in the new interview, it turns out (and it’s not at all of a surprise, given that along with the announcement came a fully made teaser trailer complete with the names of every episode) that Netflix knew they wanted a second season way before — and had actually already ordered it in advance of the series’ premiere; they just waited a while for it to go public.
Matt Duffer says, “They greenlit the second season before we even premiered. So when everyone was going, ‘Is there going to be a second season?’ we had been writing the entire time. So we’ve been working on this almost all summer.” Ross Duffer adds, “It drove me crazy. ‘Please, can’t we just tell everyone we’re doing a second season?'”
In another part of the interview, the two hint at the expansiveness of what they’re exploring in the second season. Matt says:
Once we got into the room for season two, we started expanding our mythology. We never got boxed in, because we’re dealing with an alternate dimension. It feels like the possibilities are limitless. We’re building up the mythology in a way that we know now where we want the story and these characters to end.
One of the concrete ways they hinted at in which the world is expanding is that there will be a new kid character — they said, only, that she’s “cool” and that they did a “wide, wide search” for the person to play the role. Ross Duffer also notes that it’ll be structurally different and more climactic than the first season:
What we’re actually able to do the second season is ramp it up like a coaster that just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and it builds to this big, climatic finale. That was harder in the first season because Will was taken right away and everyone was on high alert.
Finally, they mention that the titles named in the teaser trailer are quite relevant:
Even if they aren’t the final chapter titles, everything in that teaser is major. But they’re ambiguous enough that no one is going to be able to figure it out. Some of the fan theories online are amazing. Most are wrong, but I’ve read a few that are right or very close. Is it Reddit? Some of those people have figured stuff out based off of the chapter titles.
So…enjoy mining the bowels of Reddit for all that!