Another 1980s icon is joining the cast of Stranger Things.
Linda Hamilton will be part of the Netflix hit’s final season, the streamer announced Saturday at its Tudum fan event. Details on the Terminator star’s role are being kept quiet for now.
Hamilton appeared via video message the event and was introduced by her Terminator co-star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to announce the renewal of his series FUBAR.
Netflix announced in February 2022 that Stranger Things would end with its fifth season. Season four, which premiered in May 2022, became Netflix’s biggest season of an English-language series to date, racking up 1.35 billion hours of viewing over its first 28 days and spending 19 weeks in the streamer’s top 10 rankings.
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Stranger Things has referenced The Terminator — though not Hamilton’s role specifically — in its stew of 1980s pop-culture callbacks. The Soviet assassin Grigori (Andrey Ivchenko) in season three was styled to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s killer cyborg from the film, and Cary Elwes’ character even refers to Grigori as “Arnold Schwarzenegger” at one point.
Hamilton joins fellow 1980s breakouts Winona Ryder, Cary Elwes, Matthew Modine, Sean Astin, Paul Reiser and Robert Englund in signing on to Stranger Things. Season five is likely at least a year from arriving on Netflix — and possibly longer than that, depending on how much progress creators Matt and Ross Duffer and their fellow writers had made on scripts before the Writers Guild of America went on strike in May.
At a November 2022 event, Ross Duffer described the final season as “a culmination of all of the seasons, so it’s sort of got a little bit from each, whereas before each season was distinct — three, this is our big summer blockbuster season with our big monster; four was the psychological horror. I think that what we’re trying to do is go back to the beginning a little bit in the tone of [season] one, but scale-wise it’s more in line with what [season] four is. Hopefully it’s got a little bit of everything.”
Hamilton recurs on Syfy’s Resident Alien. Other recent credits include TNT’s Claws and 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, where she reprised her role as Sarah Connor.
