Linda Hamilton Joins ‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Cast

Season 5 of ‘Stranger Things’ just got bigger.

The final season of Matt and Ross Duffer’s 1980s-set sci-fi blockbuster was already one of the most anticipated TV events in recent memory. But at Netflix’s TUDUM fan event in Brazil on Saturday, the streaming giant upped the ante announcing that action movie legend Linda Hamilton joins the cast for the fifth season.

Hamilton is best known for playing Sarah Connor in the ‘Terminator’ franchise, starting with James Cameron’s 1984 original film and continuing through 2019’s ‘Terminator: Dark Fate’. Her casting adds one last dose of the films pedigree genre drama to a cast that has already played Winona Ryder and played the likes of Robert Englund in smaller roles.

Little is known about the plot of Season 5, though the Duffer brothers have hinted that the series will continue down the increasingly dark path established in Season 4.

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“(For) two hours, we pitched the entire season to Netflix. We made our executives cry, which I thought was a good sign,” Matt Duffer said at a recent Netflix event. “The only other time I’ve seen them cry is like, budget meetings.”

Ross Duffer added that their writing process for season five placed particular emphasis on ensuring that the show’s many supporting characters have proper endings.

“We have so many characters now, most of them still alive,” he said. “It’s important to wrap up those arcs as a lot of these characters have grown up since season one. So it’s a balancing act between giving them time to complete their character arcs and also tying up those loose ends and making our final reveals.”

Appearing on the same panel, “Stranger Things” executive producer and director Shawn Levy teased that season five will satisfy fans of the show while staying true to the emotional core that made it a hit in the first place.

“The thing about these Duffer Brothers is that even though the show has become so famous, and the characters have become so iconic, and there’s so much about the ’80s, and the supernatural and the genre, it’s about these people,” Levy said. “It’s about the characters. And season five is already clearly dealing with these character stories, because they’ve always been the lifeblood of ‘Stranger Things.’