Actor Joseph Quinn has recently been embraced by the metal community for his role as Eddie Munson in the latest season of the Netflix hit series “Stranger Things.” Munson is the metalhead leader of the Dungeons & Dragons group, Hellfire Club, and he sports a Dio jacket that was actually acquired from the Ronnie James Dio estate by the show’s costume designer, Amy Parris.
“I love Eddie,” Parris said of the character. “I think Eddie feels so real. And he’s wearing one thing, because he’s in that outfit the whole time, so I really focused and zeroed in on making sure everything in that outfit was authentic. He’s a fan of wizard metal, he’s a fan of Dio. He’s a fan of Metallica. Actually, Dio was a popular band in the ’80s, and we reached out to the estate [of the late Ronnie James Dio to source a band shirt]. His wife is in charge of his estate and offered to send us vintage T-shirts, which was such a dream.”
Quinn told Entertainment Weekly about how he prepared for the role. “I listened to a lot of heavy metal. That was my … God, it’s impossible to not sound pretentious when you say it, but, yeah, that was my way in.” Quinn also said he started playing guitar after seeing Jack Black in the 2003 movie, “School of Rock.” “I’ve played since I was 7, and I’ve had huge breaks,” he said. “I wouldn’t consider myself a brilliant guitarist, but I can play it. That was very lucky because those scripts came out, I think, at some point in the pandemic. I did start practicing pretty furiously.”
Further proof of Quinn’s commitment to the role was revealed in a YouTube video which shows the actor actually learning how to play “Master Of Puppets” on guitar. Metallica was stoked for the song’s inclusion and issued a statement saying: “The way The Duffer Brothers have incorporated music into ‘Stranger Things’ has always been next level, so we were beyond psyched for them to not only include ‘Master Of Puppets’ in the show but to have such a pivotal scene built around it. We were all stoked to see the final result and when we did we were totally blown away… it’s so extremely well done, so much so, that some folks were able to guess the song just by seeing a few seconds of Joseph Quinn’s hands in the trailer!! How crazy cool is that? It’s an incredible honor to be such a big part of Eddie’s journey and to once again be keeping company with all of the other amazing artists featured in the show.”
Metallica also recently shared a TikTok video where the four members of the group play along with Munson in the scene. On the left side of the minute-long, split-screen video, Metallica mime to the track in their rehearsal space while on the right side, footage plays from the “Stranger Things” scene. “Eddie… this is for you!” reads the caption on Metallica’s video. The band also sport shirts of the Hellfire Club.
Actor Jamie Campbell Bower, who plays season four’s demonic bad guy Vecna, told the “Kyle Meredith With …” podcast that he listened to a lot of Sunn O))) and Darkthrone to get into the darkness of his role. “When I was prepping for Vecna, to get into Vecna, I would use a lot of bands like Sunn O))), Carpathian Forest, Darkthrone, Mayhem. A lot of black metal kind of stuff that I just really latched onto and thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’ There’s also something about the sensitivity in the way black metal is made and their belief system which I really f*cking vibe with.”
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