Joe Keery Got Real About The 'Weird' Thing That Happened After The Stranger Things Cast Filmed For A Decade

Now that the 2025 TV schedule has brought those with a Netflix subscription the first part of Stranger Things Season 5, we are inching ever closer to the end of an era. This season holds the final freaky adventures of Dustin, Eleven, Mike, Lucas, Max, Will, their friends and family, and fans have already turned out in droves to see how everything ends with Vecna. Our feelings about the new season are all over the place, but star Joe Keery just got real about a “weird” thing that happened after everyone had been filming for a decade.

What Odd Thing Did Joe Keery Say Happened After Filming Stranger Things For A Decade?

It was in the summer of 2016 that Stranger Things debuted and first set the world on fire as streaming’s preeminent “children in supernatural peril” series. We’ve now literally watched as the main cast has grown up on screen and in real life, with stars Sadie Sink, Caleb McLaughlin, Millie Bobby Brown (who’s married and has a child of her own), Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, and Gaten Matarazzo all now being in their early 20s.

Recently, when the cast was speaking with Entertainment Tonight, they were asked about spending the past decade working on the popular series and whether or not the time seems to have passed quickly. As they began to reveal their ages when the show first started, however, Joe Keery (who’s portrayed stalwart hero Steve Harrington since Season 1) mentioned the…strange thing that happened for him as one of the actors who began the series in his early 20s:

Oooooh…While I’d certainly thought about what it must be like to be part of a TV show for basically half your life (as younger cast members like Wolfhard – who found himself randomly crying about the series ending – know), I really hadn’t considered how “weird” it would be to watch the youngest castmates get to the same age as those who started the show by portraying high school students.

Keery, Natalia Dyer, and Charlie Heaton are all now in their early 30s, while Maya Hawke (who started the show in Season 3) is currently 27. What I’m now picturing is that feeling when you meet someone who has a full-on career, owns a home and has children, and you then find out they were born when you were a senior in college. Not only does it make you feel unexpectedly old, but it also leads to a feeling of, “Like…HOW?!?!”

You understand, logically, that plenty of time has passed since then, but it still seems like it just happened. My mom used to talk all the time about how oddly the passage of time seems; with events that happened a long time ago sometimes feeling both recent and like seriously ancient history. I didn’t fully get it when I was 20 or whatever, but now that I’m many decades past literally all of my schooling…yeah, man. I feel it deeply on frequent occasions.

So, it makes complete sense that having the little kids of ST get to the point where they’re basically the same age that Keery was when he started the show was a real trip for the actor. And, it sounds exactly like the kind of mind game that Vecna would settle in and play for the long haul.