Warning: This article contains spoilers from Stranger Things Season 4 Volume 1. 

Joe Quinn had low expectations when he was invited to audition for Stranger Things. “There are things that come into your inbox and you think, ‘Yeah, okay. Let’s just get this off the desk then,’” the South Londoner tells Tudum over Zoom. Before joining the sci-fi drama as Eddie Munson — Hellfire Club president and Season 4 breakout star — Quinn had auditioned for multiple American projects but never heard back about any of them, he recently shared on Netflix’s Geeked podcast. Thankfully, that cold streak ended in November 2019 when he auditioned with an early version of Eddie’s epic Episode 1 takedown of high school hierarchies. 

“It’s a big old motherfucker, that scene,” says Quinn. “I just put a bit of eyeliner on, I borrowed my mate’s jacket and I stuck some gum in my mouth thinking that might be kind of, I don’t know, cool?” Quinn laughs. “I still can’t believe that they picked me, really.”

Joe Quinn’s Eddie Munson (center) revving up his Hellfire mentees Dustin Henderson (played by Gaten Matarazzo, left) and Mike Wheeler (played by Finn Wolfhard, right).

For Stranger Things co-creators Matt and Ross Duffer, the choice became instantly clear. “Honestly, we didn’t fully know who Eddie was 100% until we saw Joe’s audition tape,” Matt Duffer previously told Tudum. “None of the actors could do [the speech] in a way where you like this guy, where you didn’t want to just punch him. Right? And Joe, I don’t know how he did it. He was the only one. There was literally no other option. Joe just pulled it off.”

Eddie Munson holding court as president of the Hellfire Club.

That jolt of electricity watching him bring Eddie to life wasn’t unique to the Duffers. Quinn’s metalhead rocker has swiftly become the favorite of the new season, as fans declare themselves part of the Eddie Munson hive. The night before Volume 1 dropped, Quinn popped over to a pub with some friends to keep anxiety at bay, but he couldn’t stop himself from at least skimming a few reviews. “I saw that [the reception] had mainly been positive, and I just drew a line under it and cracked on with my life. I don’t really feel like I’m in whatever’s happening or I’m in the middle of it at all. I don’t know, it’s fucking weird, but it’s great.”

While Quinn is “a bit frightened” of Instagram, a friend created an account for him in April. Even though he doesn’t control it (yet), he has seen all of the “funny videos that our very gracious fans have been making.” 

In the midst of premiere excitement, Quinn could have easily found himself “losing his mind on a daily basis,” as Eddie kindly says to comfort cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham (Grace Van Dien) in Episode 1. But he didn’t, thanks to his next movie, Hoard, which occupied his mind up until he and father A.J. flew to New York for the Season 4 premiere. “We had a beautiful weekend there, and then I was straight back on the plane and was working the next morning. It felt very surreal,” the 28-year-old says.

The night everything started to go wrong for Eddie Munson (Quinn, left), as he was the sole witness to Chrissy Cunningham (Grace Van Dien)’s murder at the hands of Vecna.

On Stranger Things, Eddie lives with his uncle because his father isn’t around. However, the same can’t be said of Quinn’s real-life dad, who couldn’t be happier for his son; A.J. has used the hashtag #prouddad multiple times on Twitter. “[He’s] got to stop doing that,” Quinn jokes, before adding, “He’s a brilliant dad. I lucked out there.”

While the ’80s-set Stranger Things is technically a contemporary period drama, Quinn came up performing in a number of more traditional costume pieces such as Howard’s End and Dickensian. “At the beginning, there were a lot of waist coats,” recalls Quinn, who also portrayed Enjolras in Les Misérables opposite The Crown’s Josh O’Connor as Marius. “I remember at that particular time, Josh was just blowing up through God’s Own Country, and it was very exciting being near that and working with him and just seeing how brilliant he was.” 

After playing the rebellious Enjolras, Quinn is once again on the wrong side of the law as Eddie, who becomes the main suspect in the investigation of Chrissy’s murder. Eddie is thrust into an impossible situation but can’t stop beating himself up for running scared after Chrissy’s gruesome death. For his part, Quinn believes Eddie should have taken the advice he gives his fellow Dungeons & Dragons players in their game at the top of the season — that there’s no shame in running.

Photograph by Jabari Jacobs

“I think we all struggle with accepting our powerlessness over certain situations. And it’s impossible to think about what you could have done differently; if you’d have said something, maybe it would’ve been different. We constantly mine the past for interior presence, but that’s not the way that life works,” says Quinn. “He’s also still pretty young and has witnessed something that, I don’t know about you, but that would shake me up. And being confronted with the blame of that is just doing him no favors whatsoever. He’s in a really tight spot and doing the best he can. But he could be nicer to himself.” 

One plotline that could have gone very differently, if Vecna hadn’t decided to curse the citizens of Hawkins, is Eddie’s relationship with “Queen of Hawkins High,” Chrissy. As we witness in their scene in the woods, Eddie softens around her and immediately disarms her with his humor. You can’t help but root for the couple and wish Chrissy could have made it to one of Eddie’s gigs with his band Corroded Coffin — after dumping golden boy athlete Jason, that is.

“Eddie would have to step on Jason’s shoes pretty intensely,” Quinn says of Eddie and Chrissy’s potential pairing. “It would be lovely if there was a world in which [they could] be a pretty uncouth couple at Hawkins High that I think might shake things up a little bit.”

“I really loved the scene that I got to do with Grace Van Dien in the woods in Episode 1,” Quinn says.

Nevertheless, Eddie and Chrissy’s exchange in the woods is the scene Quinn is most proud of because it peels back Eddie’s bold and confident exterior and reveals the caring warmth underneath. “I just wanted to show someone that felt real. And what was so fun was doing that with someone that looked so extraordinarily kind of odd — to me, anyway,” he says. “I think, as human beings, we’re all very multifaceted. There are situations we’re in where we feel like we can be very assertive and brave and bold and command space. And then there are situations where you don’t feel like that, and you can feel the opposite, but you’re still the same person.”

He continues: “I always hate saying the phrase ‘as an actor,’ because it’s just like, ‘Shut up,’ but as an actor [Laughs], bear with me, you want to do that with characters that you play. You want to show all the different facets. Because, inherently, we’re very fragile things, human beings. We all have different means of coping with being alive, and it’s all survival, really.”

Quinn found Eddie’s courage particularly inspirational, even if Eddie didn’t see it in himself. After all, Steve Harrington (Joe Keery) tells Eddie to give himself a break after all he’s been through in Episode 7. “I think he’s brave and trying to be brave and allowing himself to not always be brave, and that’s okay,” Quinn says. 

From Left to Right: Joe Keery, Natalia Dyer, Maya Hawke and Quinn, as Hawkins’ resident older teens.

While we’ve yet to see Eddie shred on guitar, Quinn actually plays off-screen as well. He had a band in primary school and occasionally strums some tunes in his downtime, including on the Stranger Things set. “Charlie [Heaton, who plays Jonathan Byers] is a brilliant drummer, and our friend Carlos, who lives in Atlanta, is a great friend of the cast and a great friend of mine now, [and] we did an ironic punk band rehearsal once in the height of our tedium just to have a bit of a laugh,” he remembers. “That was quite funny. I think it was called Soft Metal or something like that.”

As a teenager, Quinn traded music lessons for skateboarding. He had a few friends in the skateboarding scene of South London that took him under their wing, just like Eddie does with Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) and Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin) by bringing them into the Hellfire Club. 

“I had some older friends there who were very strange and brilliant and different,” he compares. “I think [Eddie] probably recognized something in them that he had and there’s, funnily enough, a weird club where people get together who are just like you and that is a comfort to him. So I think he wanted to share that kind of twisted love.”

Tina Rowden/Netflix

As Stranger Things Season 4 is more ambitious than ever before, with storylines spread across different locations, Quinn found it gratifying to watch all of Volume 1 after filming separately. “Everyone worked really hard on it for a long time. And what I find so satisfying about it is seeing the other Stranger Things stories and how they all live together. Because we were making our Stranger Things and then there were two other Stranger Things being made at the same time,” he says.

“It’s a tremendous achievement that the Duffer brothers have been able to basically make three movies and sew them all together and to maintain the tension in all of them. It’s mad. And the scale of it is breathtaking. One minute you are in a Russian prison, and then you’re on a plane with Winona [Ryder, who plays Joyce Byers] and Brett [Gelman, who plays Murray Bauman], and then you’re in this witch hunt for Eddie’s character. It’s nonstop.”

What’s also nonstop? Vecna’s thirst for power from his mind lair. But Quinn has his own song in mind if he ever had to be snapped out of Vecna’s trances. “‘Up and Down’ by The VengaBoys,” he jokes. “It’s a silly song.” 

While Eddie the Banished vacillates between owning and resenting his “freak” label on Stranger Things, Quinn admits that, yeah, in a way, he’s a freak, too, especially considering his line of work as an actor.

“With one hand it gives and the other it takes away. You have a potential for a very versatile and different, ever-changing life where you get an opportunity, you go away and you make something with, most of the time, a bunch of strangers. And then on the flip side, it’s a life of total uncertainty, financial instability — it’s either feast or famine — and you are in control of none of it.” In other words? “You’ve got to be a bit of a freak to want to do that, I guess.”

But, just like Eddie, Quinn says, “I wouldn’t change it for the world.”

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