Although Eddie Munson became an instant fan favorite when Season 4 premiered, Joe Quinn, thankfully, wasn’t losing his mind on a daily basis. “I don’t really feel like I’m in whatever’s happening or I’m in the middle of it at all,” he tells Tudum. “I don’t know, it’s fucking weird, but it’s great.”Tina Rowden/Netflix
Quinn’s audition for Eddie was his beloved cafeteria scene. “I 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?”
“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,” Quinn says of a potential romance between Eddie and Chrissy (Grace Van Dien).
Eddie and Chrissy’s (Van Dien) exchange in the woods is the scene Quinn is most proud of because it peels back Eddie’s bold exterior, revealing the 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.
Quinn reigns as president and Dungeon Master of the Hellfire Club, but he only recently played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time at Geeked Week.
Head makeup artist Amy L. Forsythe had no idea that so many of Eddie’s (Quinn) tattoos foreshadowed him shredding “Master of Puppets” in the finale. “Pretty rad that it lined up that way, though,” she tells Tudum. She gave Eddie bat tattoos because they’re “pretty heavy metal,” and she had already read the episode where Steve (Joe Keery) gets attacked. “The Puppet Master tattoo was my nod at the control Vecna has over his victims,” she says.
Eddie (Quinn) lords over the end of his sadistic D&D campaign with his fellow Hellfire Club “freaks” (and Corroded Coffin band members played by Gwydion Lashlee-Walton, Trey Best and Grant Goodman) by his side.
Eddie beats himself up all season for running scared after witnessing Chrissy’s (Van Dien) gruesome murder, and for his part, Quinn thinks Eddie “could be nicer to himself.” He tells Tudum, “I don’t know about you, but that would shake me up. 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.”
“Joe brought his own thing to it,” says Matt Duffer of Quinn’s Eddie. “He’s the kind of guy whose every take is different — he was finding it as we went. I’m so happy that people are responding so well to Eddie because we and all the other actors on set fell in love with Joe.”
Eddie (Quinn) and “Red” — as he calls Max (Sadie Sink), his neighbor in Hawkins’ trailer park. Tina Rowden/Netflix
“Honestly, we didn’t fully know who Eddie was 100% until we saw Joe’s audition tape,” Matt Duffer tells Tudum. “None of the actors could do [the cafeteria 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.”Tina Rowden/Netflix
Eddie (Quinn) likens Dustin’s (Gaten Matarazzo) request to leave Skull Rock to following him into Mordor. “But the Shire is burning, so... Mordor it is,” says Eddie in the scene. As a Lord of the Rings fan, Quinn says, “I was very excited when I saw that Mordor line.”
Eddie (Quinn), Robin (Maya Hawke) and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) not-so-merrily rowing their boat across Lover’s Lake in search of Watergate.
Nancy (Dyer), Steve (Keery), Robin (Hawke) and Eddie (Quinn) defeat the Demobats when they first face Vecna’s (Jamie Campbell Bower) minions in the Upside Down.
The Duffers agree that the scene in the Upside Down between Eddie (Quinn) and Steve (Keery) is really sweet. “They’re not quite on the same page. [Steve] doesn’t know who Ozzy Osbourne is, but there’s still this mutual respect, which I like about that scene,” Ross Duffer says.
“What’s sad about [Eddie’s] narrative is that the people who get to know him love him, and the people who don’t have judged him horribly — just because of the way he dresses and just because of his interests,” says Matt Duffer.
Quinn didn’t “go away and write a fucking novella of a backstory” for Eddie. But he did have a loose background for Eddie’s parents: “I thought that his mum had maybe passed on or had left, and his dad was in prison,” says Quinn. “He was very estranged from his parents, and that brings up all the stuff that brings up for young people.”Tina Rowden/Netflix
“Everyone worked really hard on it for a long time. What I find so satisfying about it is seeing the other Stranger Things stories and how they all live together,” Quinn says of watching all of Volume 1 after the cast all filmed in separate locations. “Because we were making our Stranger Things, and then there were two other Stranger Things being made at the same time.”
“I think he’s brave and trying to be brave and allowing himself to not always be brave, and that’s OK,” says Quinn of Eddie’s courage.
“I think, as human beings, we’re all very multifaceted,” Quinn says. “There are situations we’re in where we feel like we can be very assertive, brave, 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.”
“In all of those great huge-scale battle sequences, there’s always that calm before the storm,” Quinn says. “Like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, there’s always that preparation before the big battle that is so satisfying as a viewer to watch because you know that something mad is going to happen — and something definitely mad does happen in this one.”
In Volume 1, Eddie (Quinn) suggests that the gang go to War Zone for ammo and steal an RV. Quinn notes that “at some point, there’s a shift that happens in his head, and he’s determined to not be this scared little boy and try to be proactive.”
Matt Duffer tells Tudum that “there was going to be more of a Steve-Eddie rivalry. We just didn’t have time.” Ross Duffer adds, “Also, we’re just like, ‘He’s so charismatic that it’s like, how can you not like Eddie?’"
“Harrington’s got her. Don’t ya, big boy?” quips Eddie in Episode 8, a line improvised by Quinn.
To Quinn, all the readying to fight Vecna felt like a nod to Battle Royale. “That scene is very Henry V when they’re preparing before the Battle of Agincourt. Yeah, yeah, I’m a horrifically pretentious British actor. I have to crowbar a Shakespeare reference in there. Lock me up.” [laughs]
“There will be no more running from Eddie the Banished."
Eddie (Quinn) and Dustin (Matarazzo) are ready for bat-tle.
In the season’s initial D&D game, Eddie asks his party, “Do you flee Vecna and his cultists or do you stand your ground and fight?” Quinn considers that line “the motif that runs through his arc, really. It’s about confronting one’s problems. It’s about redemption, about bravery. All of those seeds are planted in those earlier episodes and they bear fruit later on.”
Quinn found out about Eddie’s death when he received the script one early morning at 3 a.m. “I was in Europe somewhere, and I read it and obviously couldn't sleep because I just thought, ‘How the hell have they come up with that?’ And then later that morning, I went and bought a guitar and manically started practicing.”
Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” was originally released on March 3, 1986, around the same time Season 4 of Stranger Things is set. “I think we figured that out pretty close to the shoot day, if not on the shoot day, which was hilarious,” says Quinn. To him, the song feels like a “smack in the face,” building as the “perfect engine through that whole sequence.”
Quinn has played guitar since primary school, but the Duffers didn’t know that when they cast him. It was only during the pandemic that they happened to email Quinn to ask if he played. “I was like, ‘I mean, I can play guitar. I’m no virtuoso, but I’ll be able to get away with looking like I play guitar.’ I hope,” recalls Quinn. “They said, ‘OK, good to know.’” Quinn didn’t hear anything else on the matter from the brothers until he received the script for Episode 9.
“There was a backing track when we were playing on the day, but I was playing along to it,” Quinn says, before bashfully adding, “I don’t know if anyone would want to hear it.”
As Eddie tears the pick off his necklace and rips, he dedicates his epic “Master of Puppets” guitar solo to Chrissy. “If he's able to avenge her, this is his way. So, I imagine there's a catharsis there,” Quinn says. “And it’s just fucking badass, isn't it?”
Quinn says he’s sure “there’s a Dungeons & Dragons thing” in Dustin (Matarazzo) and Eddie’s battle garb that resembles the sword and spear of a mossy paladin.
“It’s just so heartbreaking, isn’t it?” Quinn says of Eddie’s end. “I think it would’ve meant the world to him in those moments [that Dustin came back for him]. Before we pass on, God willing, you don’t want to be alone, do you? You want someone to get you there.”
“As always, I just run up to the [Duffer] brothers and go, ‘Use that one. Don't use that one.’ They both go, ‘Fuck off,’” Quinn jokes of his reaction to filming multiple takes of his death scene with Dustin (Matarazzo).
