Stranger Things star promises satisfying ending for Dustin, is open to returning
By Dan Selcke
Next year, heaven willing, we will watching the fifth and final season of Stranger Things, three years after season 4 dropped in 2022. Expectations are high after so long a wait, but I'm sure creators Matt and Ross Duffer want to end their sci-fi coming-of-age story on a high note.
We're starting to get teases from the cast, including Gaten Matarazzo, who has played fan favorite Dustin Henderson from the beginning. Speaking to RadioTimes, he promises a satisfying ending for Dustin: "It definitely will be a bookend. I think it will wrap up really nicely."
Matarazzo also speculated on what might lie in the future for Dustin beyond this ending, which if nothing else implies that Dustin will survive whatever's coming. When he and his friends are facing down a deadly interdimensional menace like Vecna, you can't be sure of anything. "I don't think Matt or Ross will want to approach anything like that for a long time. So if you were to ask me a year from now if I wanted to come back, I'd probably be like, 'I’m gonna do some other stuff for a bit initially,' but who knows what it's going to be like," he mused. "I would love to see, potentially, if there's a continuation of Dustin after [season] 5, if any of us make it up to that point, I would love to see what would happen, what Dustin would be like as a 30-year-old. And I would love to see at tackling that, it could be a lot of fun."
"I'd be interested in seeing what their concept would be, but yeah, I’m absolutely open to anything. If it's good and it's exciting and other people are excited about doing it, absolutely. I would like to branch off and do some other stuff initially, I think for the next few years at least."
Dustin is one of several characters on the show whom we've watched grow from kids to young adults. It would indeed be interesting to see what they get up to as grown-ups. For Dustin, I'm betting he becomes a scientist or a sci-fi writer.
There is at least one Stranger Things spinoff currently in development, but it doesn't sound like it will involve any of the cast from the original show. For that, we'll probably have a wait a good many years. For now, I'll be happy with just seeing the final episodes. All told, the show will have lasted nine years when things wrap up in 2025. That's quite a long journey, even if there was a lot of waiting mixed in there.
As for what else Matarazzo might do with his time while he mulls a return to the Stranger Things universe, it's wide open. He's done theater, appeared in movies, and this year he'll voice the lead character in Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy. Something tells me he'll have offers aplenty whenever the final episodes of Stranger Things roll out. I have a feeling they're going to be spectacular.
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