Latest news with #Wolfhard
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The only Stranger Things star to correctly predict what the long-awaited spin-off would be, according to the Duffer brothers, says it could be an anthology "tied together through this mythology of the Upside Down"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Finn Wolfhard knows what the forthcoming live-action Stranger Things spin-off will be about, and he's finally revealed what he thinks the Duffer brothers have in mind. "Like David Lynch's Twin Peaks," Wolfhard told Variety, when asked about the spin-off. "Sort of an anthology and different tones but similar universe or same universe. I think set in different places and all tied together through this mythology of the Upside Down. Don't even talk about Hawkins. Don't have any mention of our characters. They were toying around with ideas in case Netflix wanted them. I'm sure they do, and I'm sure it will happen, but there's nothing official. I think the coolest way, the way that I would do it, there has to be labs everywhere. If there was one in Hawkins, there's one in Russia. Where else could they be?' According to co-creator Ross Duffer, Wolfhard is the only person on the Stranger Things team who has "figured out what the spinoff is," and that not even "Netflix, not any of the producers, not any of the directors, not any of the actors" were able to guess correctly. Back in 2022, Duffer said that he thinks "everyone – including Netflix – will be surprised when they hear the concept, because it's very, very different." So while we now though it will likely be an anthology of sorts... we still don't know anything else. And given how long it took to get season 5 onto our screens, we can speculate that we won't know more about the spin-off until much later down the line. The flagship series is finally coming to a close, with the first part of season 5 set to hit Netflix on Thanksgiving. Stranger Things season 5 Volume 1 will release on Netflix on November 26, followed by Volume 2 on Christmas Day, and The Finale on New Year's Eve. For more, check out our guide to the best Netflix movies, and keep up with other upcoming TV shows. Solve the daily Crossword
The Age
02-08-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
‘So cool': Stranger Things star finds his happy place among the Ochi
Having grown up on our screens as the golden-hearted schoolboy Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard is used to inhabiting an otherworldly has spent the past 10 years – almost half his life – heading off attacks from the alien forces of the Upside Down dimension. Mostly, he has confronted the unknown on greenscreen: blank sets where the work of computer animators will round out the action. 'They are amazing artists in their own way,' he says. 'But as an actor, you are reacting off nothing.' What attracted him to making fantasy film The Legend of Ochi, he says, was its hand-made quality. Isaiah Saxon's film, which is screening at MIFF, is also a fantasy about a clash between humans and bizarre creatures, but it is a very different beast. Most of it was shot on location. It is set in the Carpathian Mountains – Count Dracula's old haunt – where the villages, save for the occasional passing car, look very much as they always have, surrounded by mountains covered in thick forest. Here, the foolhardy explorer may encounter the Ochi, which are like large apes with an alien tweak. The smaller Ochi are played by puppets; the larger ones are actors in furry suits. 'I didn't want to go too far from nature,' says Saxon. 'I wanted the audience to see the Ochi as real animals living in a real place.' For Wolfhard, all this was fantastically old-school. 'I loved the idea of working with animatronics and puppets,' he says, speaking over Zoom along with German actress Helena Zengel, who plays the film's heroine, Yuri. The puppets, he says, required people to operate them; one person's entire job might be operating a key Ochi's ears. 'This was an opportunity to really have this kind of amazing experience which not a lot of people get to have these days,' says Wolfhard, who has been in our lounge rooms as Mike since he was 12, but is still only 22. 'There was a whole team of people piloting the Ochi. And there was something so cool about that because, as they were controlling the puppets, they were the real actors.' Zengel is 17, but her character is just emerging from childhood, torn between loyalty to her embittered father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and longing for her mother Dasha (Emily Watson), a mythic figure who left the family under an impenetrable cloud years before. Maxim regularly takes the local boys – his proxy sons, handed over by their fathers for Maxim to toughen up – out on raiding parties. They try to kill any Ochi they can find, then come home for a revivifying wrestle; it's a sort of genocidal version of Scouts. Wolfhard plays Petro, a hesitant orphan whom Maxim has taken into his home. Petro is repelled by this bloodlust but is too timid to say so; it is Yuri who is the good shot, keen to hold her own among the boys. Until, the day after one of these night raids, she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods. The little Ochi looks like a cross between Yoda and a bush baby. Miserable Yuri feels an immediate affinity for it; more remarkably, she discovers she can trill its musical language. She takes it home, bandages it, sings to it. Loading 'I wanted to centre a kid who felt that her ability to express herself had withered or died,' says Saxon. 'Yuri is shut down and her only outlet is listening to screaming black metal. Then she sees an animal that is an antidote to everything humans are: direct, intuitive, instinctual. What would happen to that kid if that Ochi energy was in her life?' As it happens – and happenstance proves unusually obliging here, even by the standards of fairytale – she rediscovers her mother, Dasha, now a shepherd high in the hills. You can't befriend an Ochi,' says Dasha. You shouldn't try. 'Look at what we did to wolves,' she spits. 'Turned them into lapdogs!' This is Saxon's first feature, but he has already carved out a significant career as an inspired music video director, working with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear; Wolfhard, who recently released his first album, was drawn to the project initially because he was a fan of those clips. 'I have this discomfort with our reliance on language as the primary communication format as human,' Saxon says. The Ochi communicate by merging their emotions through their voices, which are produced by mixing a mockingbird's call and something called a throat whistle. Saxon discovered the throat whistle and its great exponent, Paul Manalatos, when he was trawling the internet. There was Manalatos, warbling into his webcam. Somehow, that's very much in the spirit of the film. Zengel started acting even earlier than Wolfhard. She was 10 years old when she was lauded as revelatory in the tough 2019 German drama System Crasher, about a frighteningly volatile ward of the state who is passed from one agency to another, all her carers soon admitting she is beyond them. 'I was super young, you know,' she says. 'Back then, obviously I had fun saying these bad words! It was a cool time; I was able to do anything that kids shouldn't do. But I understood what was going on, I understood the topic and I took it seriously.' Loading The Legend of Ochi, as a family movie culminating in a clutch of benign messages about tolerance, diversity and the environment, is ostensibly that film's polar opposite, but Zengel notes that it doesn't condescend to younger audiences. Very young children might have eyes only for the baby Ochi, but there is a darkness at the heart of the story that could provoke uncomfortable questions for viewers of any age. 'I think there are adults who might take life lessons from it,' she says. 'It has beautiful side stories that it tells and things that you can project on today's society and today's life. So I think it's a very complex film.' Wolfhard agrees. 'I loved the script for just that reason. That, yes, kids could watch it, but it wasn't explicitly for children. I think movies made for kids in the last 15 years really try to spoon-feed children and assume they can't take in more nuanced themes.' Think of a great movie for children: almost everyone goes straight for The Wizard of Oz. 'I watched that as a kid and there's a lot of scary stuff in that movie. But life is scary!' says Wolfhard. 'Oh yes! I was traumatised by The Wizard of Oz!' enthuses Zengel. 'I like when children even at a young age see films or talk about things that are more serious.' Obviously, the Ochi are standing in for all the real animals that have been hunted or crowded out by humans – wolves, whales, tigers – at the same time as pushing a plea for peaceful co-existence that children readily understand. Closer to home, however, is the film's frankness about families' failings. Loading When Yuri runs away, mad Maxim dons some armour that could date back to Vlad the Impaler, gathers his boys and prepares to run his daughter to ground with a rifle. Dafoe's Maxim is ultimately a pathetically vulnerable man, but he's dangerous with it; Emily Watson, as the bolter, is hardly a cosy mother figure. They compare poorly with Ochi parents, who enfold their young in their fur, singing. The film is also prepared to face the unhappiness of children. As someone who grew up in front of millions of people, Wolfhard has spoken with feeling about how he was unable to explain to anyone, including himself, that he was not enjoying his Stranger Things fame in the way that everyone around him assumed he was. 'When people ask a kid, 'Are you OK?' they'll say, 'yes'. And that means nothing,' he told Cosmopolitan. 'Kids don't want to disappoint anyone. They don't even know if they're OK.' All these kids are unhappy. In the great tradition of children's literature, however, they will find a way out through having their own adventures, away from adult meddling. And, in Yuri's case, with a secret furry friend.
Sydney Morning Herald
01-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
‘So cool': Stranger Things star finds his happy place among the Ochi
Having grown up on our screens as the golden-hearted schoolboy Mike Wheeler in Stranger Things, Finn Wolfhard is used to inhabiting an otherworldly has spent the past 10 years – almost half his life – heading off attacks from the alien forces of the Upside Down dimension. Mostly, he has confronted the unknown on greenscreen: blank sets where the work of computer animators will round out the action. 'They are amazing artists in their own way,' he says. 'But as an actor, you are reacting off nothing.' What attracted him to making fantasy film The Legend of Ochi, he says, was its hand-made quality. Isaiah Saxon's film, which is screening at MIFF, is also a fantasy about a clash between humans and bizarre creatures, but it is a very different beast. Most of it was shot on location. It is set in the Carpathian Mountains – Count Dracula's old haunt – where the villages, save for the occasional passing car, look very much as they always have, surrounded by mountains covered in thick forest. Here, the foolhardy explorer may encounter the Ochi, which are like large apes with an alien tweak. The smaller Ochi are played by puppets; the larger ones are actors in furry suits. 'I didn't want to go too far from nature,' says Saxon. 'I wanted the audience to see the Ochi as real animals living in a real place.' For Wolfhard, all this was fantastically old-school. 'I loved the idea of working with animatronics and puppets,' he says, speaking over Zoom along with German actress Helena Zengel, who plays the film's heroine, Yuri. The puppets, he says, required people to operate them; one person's entire job might be operating a key Ochi's ears. 'This was an opportunity to really have this kind of amazing experience which not a lot of people get to have these days,' says Wolfhard, who has been in our lounge rooms as Mike since he was 12, but is still only 22. 'There was a whole team of people piloting the Ochi. And there was something so cool about that because, as they were controlling the puppets, they were the real actors.' Zengel is 17, but her character is just emerging from childhood, torn between loyalty to her embittered father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and longing for her mother Dasha (Emily Watson), a mythic figure who left the family under an impenetrable cloud years before. Maxim regularly takes the local boys – his proxy sons, handed over by their fathers for Maxim to toughen up – out on raiding parties. They try to kill any Ochi they can find, then come home for a revivifying wrestle; it's a sort of genocidal version of Scouts. Wolfhard plays Petro, a hesitant orphan whom Maxim has taken into his home. Petro is repelled by this bloodlust but is too timid to say so; it is Yuri who is the good shot, keen to hold her own among the boys. Until, the day after one of these night raids, she finds a wounded baby Ochi in the woods. The little Ochi looks like a cross between Yoda and a bush baby. Miserable Yuri feels an immediate affinity for it; more remarkably, she discovers she can trill its musical language. She takes it home, bandages it, sings to it. Loading 'I wanted to centre a kid who felt that her ability to express herself had withered or died,' says Saxon. 'Yuri is shut down and her only outlet is listening to screaming black metal. Then she sees an animal that is an antidote to everything humans are: direct, intuitive, instinctual. What would happen to that kid if that Ochi energy was in her life?' As it happens – and happenstance proves unusually obliging here, even by the standards of fairytale – she rediscovers her mother, Dasha, now a shepherd high in the hills. You can't befriend an Ochi,' says Dasha. You shouldn't try. 'Look at what we did to wolves,' she spits. 'Turned them into lapdogs!' This is Saxon's first feature, but he has already carved out a significant career as an inspired music video director, working with artists including Björk and Grizzly Bear; Wolfhard, who recently released his first album, was drawn to the project initially because he was a fan of those clips. 'I have this discomfort with our reliance on language as the primary communication format as human,' Saxon says. The Ochi communicate by merging their emotions through their voices, which are produced by mixing a mockingbird's call and something called a throat whistle. Saxon discovered the throat whistle and its great exponent, Paul Manalatos, when he was trawling the internet. There was Manalatos, warbling into his webcam. Somehow, that's very much in the spirit of the film. Zengel started acting even earlier than Wolfhard. She was 10 years old when she was lauded as revelatory in the tough 2019 German drama System Crasher, about a frighteningly volatile ward of the state who is passed from one agency to another, all her carers soon admitting she is beyond them. 'I was super young, you know,' she says. 'Back then, obviously I had fun saying these bad words! It was a cool time; I was able to do anything that kids shouldn't do. But I understood what was going on, I understood the topic and I took it seriously.' Loading The Legend of Ochi, as a family movie culminating in a clutch of benign messages about tolerance, diversity and the environment, is ostensibly that film's polar opposite, but Zengel notes that it doesn't condescend to younger audiences. Very young children might have eyes only for the baby Ochi, but there is a darkness at the heart of the story that could provoke uncomfortable questions for viewers of any age. 'I think there are adults who might take life lessons from it,' she says. 'It has beautiful side stories that it tells and things that you can project on today's society and today's life. So I think it's a very complex film.' Wolfhard agrees. 'I loved the script for just that reason. That, yes, kids could watch it, but it wasn't explicitly for children. I think movies made for kids in the last 15 years really try to spoon-feed children and assume they can't take in more nuanced themes.' Think of a great movie for children: almost everyone goes straight for The Wizard of Oz. 'I watched that as a kid and there's a lot of scary stuff in that movie. But life is scary!' says Wolfhard. 'Oh yes! I was traumatised by The Wizard of Oz!' enthuses Zengel. 'I like when children even at a young age see films or talk about things that are more serious.' Obviously, the Ochi are standing in for all the real animals that have been hunted or crowded out by humans – wolves, whales, tigers – at the same time as pushing a plea for peaceful co-existence that children readily understand. Closer to home, however, is the film's frankness about families' failings. Loading When Yuri runs away, mad Maxim dons some armour that could date back to Vlad the Impaler, gathers his boys and prepares to run his daughter to ground with a rifle. Dafoe's Maxim is ultimately a pathetically vulnerable man, but he's dangerous with it; Emily Watson, as the bolter, is hardly a cosy mother figure. They compare poorly with Ochi parents, who enfold their young in their fur, singing. The film is also prepared to face the unhappiness of children. As someone who grew up in front of millions of people, Wolfhard has spoken with feeling about how he was unable to explain to anyone, including himself, that he was not enjoying his Stranger Things fame in the way that everyone around him assumed he was. 'When people ask a kid, 'Are you OK?' they'll say, 'yes'. And that means nothing,' he told Cosmopolitan. 'Kids don't want to disappoint anyone. They don't even know if they're OK.' All these kids are unhappy. In the great tradition of children's literature, however, they will find a way out through having their own adventures, away from adult meddling. And, in Yuri's case, with a secret furry friend.
News18
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- News18
Finn Wolfhard On Stranger Things Season 5: ‘We Are All Together Again'
Last Updated: Finn Wolfhard expressed his happiness at having the full cast together in the final season of Stranger Things. As Netflix's popular series Stranger Things gears up to drop its final season later this year, fans are eagerly looking forward to one last ride filled with supernatural thrills and a whirlwind of emotions. Although an official release date is yet to be announced, the fifth season is expected to arrive in two parts, with the first likely premiering at the end of this year, and the second sometime in early 2026. Amid fan speculation and growing excitement around the upcoming season of the sci-fi horror drama, Finn Wolfhard, who has portrayed Mike Wheeler since the very beginning, shared his thoughts on the series' journey from its 2016 debut to the much-anticipated finale. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Wolfhard said, 'This last season is sort of a crossroads, and so we're getting back into a lot of the dynamics of season one, which is really fun." Reflecting on his character, he added, 'There are some 'leader Mike' moments, and it's a very grand season, obviously. Every season has gotten bigger and bigger, and this one is huge, but it's also kind of isolated as well." Wolfhard, 21, expressed his happiness at having the full cast together again, after being separated across three different storylines in the previous season. He even admitted to feeling a bit envious of the Hawkins storyline, which followed Dustin, Lucas, Erica, Max, Steve, Eddie, Nancy, and Robin as they investigated a series of murders that eventually led them to the Vecna. Originally set to release in 2023, Stranger Things Season 5 was delayed due to the Hollywood strike. When asked by The Hollywood Reporter if he found the wait frustrating, Wolfhard said, 'I'm definitely not frustrated. It is what it is. You spend so much time on a show that it's all-encompassing, and it's something that means so much to me. It's the thing that made my career, and it really shaped my life. So as far as the show not coming out yet, the only frustrating part is wanting to see it and having to wait. I just want people to see it, and I want to be able to see it. But the rest of it? No. I'm indebted to Stranger Things, and it'll take however long it's going to take. There's no way to control that, so you might as well just ride it." Stranger Things was first introduced to audiences in 2016. Set in the 1980s, the story follows a group of children and adults in the town of Hawkins, Indiana as they uncover a series of mysterious events tied to supernatural powers and secret government experiments, most notably, the discovery of an alternate dimension known as the Upside Down. Season 5 will see the return of the regular ensemble cast, including Millie Bobby Brown (Eleven), Finn Wolfhard (Mike), Gaten Matarazzo (Dustin), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas), Noah Schnapp (Will), and Sadie Sink (Max). Familiar faces such as Winona Ryder (Joyce Byers), David Harbour (Jim Hopper), Brett Gelman (Murray Bauman), and Jamie Campbell Bower (Vecna) will reprise their roles as well. The Duffer Brothers have promised that Season 5 will serve as a 'love letter" to the audience. First Published:
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Stranger Things' Star, 22, Looks Totally Different With Drastic Hair Change
is rocking a whole new hairstyle—and he now looks much different than his Stranger Things character. While making an appearance at an event in Tokyo, Japan on Sunday, May 25, the 22-year-old actor revealed his freshly-shaved new buzz cut while hitting the red carpet for his photocall. 🎬SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox🎬 Fans are used to seeing Wolfhard on screen with a head full of long, dark curls, the same look his character Mike Wheeler has been rocking since the show premiered in 2016. But after filming the fifth and final season of the hit Netflix sci-fi series, Wolfhard has changed things up, opting for a clean, closely-shaved cut. The former child actor was on the red carpet for the 2025 Crunchyroll Anime Awards in Tokyo on Sunday, where he was accompanied by his Stranger Things castmate , who plays Dustin Henderson on the series. Like Wolfhard and Matarazzo, several members of the cast were just kids when they first started filming Stranger Things, and viewers have watched them grow into adults right before our eyes. Among them is , now 21, who no longer has a short pixie cut that her character Eleven was known for in the early seasons. Noah Schnapp (Will Byers), Caleb McLaughlin (Lucas Sinclair) and (Max Mayfield) have also gracefully blossomed into adulthood since their days as child actors on the series.'Stranger Things' Star, 22, Looks Totally Different With Drastic Hair Change first appeared on Parade on May 25, 2025
