Stranger Things stars tease love, death, and new characters in season 3

Stranger Things season 3 doesn’t debut next year, so we’re eager to to hear any stray bits of news we can about it. Happily, the cast is willing to drop us some scraps, as when star Finn Wolfhard (Mike Wheeler) talked to US Weekly about when exactly the next season will be set. “I don’t know much about it because we get the scripts as we go along,” he said at the premiere of his new film Dog Days. “But yeah, it’s set in 1985, in the summer. It’s the summer of love — that’s all I can say, really.”

Wolfhard is only 15, so I don’t think he knows what the actual Summer of Love was; he’s probably talking about follow-up on the various romances developing in Hawkins, Indiana when we last left it in season 2, including courtships between Mike and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) and Max (Sadie Sink). So far, the only teaser we’ve gotten for season 3 is a mock-marketing video for a mall, the place from which all teenage love springs…in the ’80s. So Wolfhard is on to something.

There’s also a potential relationship between Sheriff Jim Hopper (David Harbour) and Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) in the offing, but they’re both over 30 so we won’t spend much time on it. (Kidding.) Speaking to TV Guide, Harbour said that Hopper is going to try and improve his crappy communication skills:

"I think we’ll start to see him take more risks with these new languages of intimacy and vulnerability and maybe we’ll start to see that he has needs that he hasn’t expressed before. That’s exciting to watch him open up in that way. Of course he’s going to flail and be horrible at it too, which is always fun as well."

This is giving me tagline ideas. “Stranger Things season 3: Love in the Time of Demogorgons.”

Speaking of Sheriff Hopper, Harbour contemplated something much darker during an appearance at the 2018 Tampa Bay Comic-Con last weekend: how Hopper might die. “I would like to take a bullet for Eleven,” he said to a cheer from fans. “Now you’re all happy about me dying!”

That would be a bittersweet, if heartwarming, way for Hopper to one day go out; he developed a close surrogate father-daughter bond with Eleven over the course of season 2.

But it’s not just old favorites weighing in; season 3 will feature new characters, as well, including Bruce, a sleazy-sounding journalist played by Jake Busey, son of Gary. “If you think about the way culture has changed, life was a lot different in the ‘80s,” he told Bloody Disgusting. “This is a character who is fully living in that time period. He doesn’t mind making fun of women and children. He doesn’t mind poking fun at someone else’s expense, that type of thing. He’s just a crass newsman.”

"His sick sense of humor, he’s not putting dead animal carcasses in people’s desk drawers. It’s just he’ll poke fun at anybody and everything, but he’s a little crude. He’s not the one you would bring to dinner at your grandmother’s house. He’s a trucker mouth kind of guy.”"

Busey says he landed the role because showrunners Matt and Ross Duffer were fans of his work on the 1996 horror flick The Frighteners. “I owe Peter Jackson a thank you because The Frighteners has been a life identifying film for me.” Here’s Busey playing a mass-murdering ghost:

We’d have hired him, too.

Busey didn’t give many details on how exactly Bruce plays into the story, but he’s a journalist for The Hawkins Post, and a lot of really weird supernatural stuff has gone down in Hawkins over the past couple of seasons. You do the math.

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Bonus video: Here’s Finn Wolfhard and Glenn Close playing with puppies. Happy Friday.

h/t Floor 8