Five months after the Stranger Things finale, series creators the Duffer Brothers have admitted they put extra effort into Steve’s fake-out death because they were “f**king with the audience.”
Matt and Ross Duffer came clean during an interview with Josh Horowitz on Happy, Sad, Confused. Though the Netflix show’s final episode premiered in December, that isn’t stopping the duo behind the series from talking about the lengths they went to in order to mess with fans.
Warning! Stranger Things finale spoilers follow.
This is especially true when it comes to actor Joe Keery’s Steve Harrington, a character who had fans fearing the worst in the months leading up to the finale. One moment in the final Stranger Things episode originally saw him suffer a brief, unimpactful fall from a great height, so the Duffer Brothers set aside a half day of reshoots to spice things up.
“We did a half day of reshoots, which we’ve actually never done on Stranger Things before,” Ross Duffer said. “It was just little, tiny, miscellaneous things that we wanted to do, but the main reason we wanted to go back is because Steve’s near-death just wasn’t… It wasn’t shot like that in a slow-motion way. It all happened really fast. In the edit, it’s so dark that the moment wasn’t going back.
“Then we went back with Joe Keery, and we just built a tiny, like, 3-foot slab of the tower because we didn’t have money to rebuild it, and we just did that moment where he just dropped. Then we just milked it even more in the edit.”
The finished version of the Stranger Things series finale saw Steve fall from the tower in slow motion before Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) came to his surprise rescue after a drawn-out cut to black. Matt Duffer later added that a dramatic fake-out of this level isn’t something the crew behind the Netflix series would normally engage in, but with Stranger Things finally on its way out, they struck while the iron was hot.
“I don’t know that we normally would have done him almost falling off the tower. That was us f**king with the audience, for sure,” he said. “For sure. Which, we don’t normally do, but I was like, ‘This is a golden opportunity that we can’t pass up.'”
The Stranger Things finale teased fans with Steve’s death when it premiered December 31, 2025. Elsewhere in the interview, the Duffer Brother denied rumors related to the show’s infamous Season 2 episode and promised to reveal more about Eleven’s fate in 20 years.
Michael Cripe is a freelance writer with IGN. He’s best known for his work at sites like The Pitch, The Escapist, and OnlySP. Be sure to give him a follow on Bluesky (@mikecripe.bsky.social) and Twitter (@MikeCripe).
