partially due to a significant delay due to pandemic-related concerns, the science-fiction horror series has returned to Netflix. Season 4 finds the core group of teenagers separated physically and socially as they enter high school. Dustin Henderson (Gaten Matarazzo) and Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) find themselves distanced from Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin) as he attempts to change his perceived social status. Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) and Will Beyers (Noah Schapp) live over 2,000 miles away in a small Californian town. However, another breach from the violent parallel universe known as the Upside-Down has sent the friends down a path that will bring them back together in hopes of saving the world one more time.
Stranger Things season 4 introduces the teenagers to a new inter-dimensional monster called Vecna, a telekinetic humanoid creature who seemingly torments his victims with nightmares of their unresolved trauma and feeds off their guilt. During "Dear Billy," Max (Sadie Sink) realizes that she is cursed by Vecna and writes personal letters to her friends and family. Max addresses one to her brother Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery), who died during the Battle of Starcourt in season 3. However, as she reads the letter to her brother's tombstone, Vecna invades her mind and taunts her with a frightening vision of Billy resurrected.
In a recent interview with EW, Levy detailed how he filmed Billy's cameo appearance in Stranger Things season 4. As COVID spread worldwide, no media production was unaffected by the virus. Levy explained that Montgomery could not travel from Australia to the production's set for the shoot. Instead, he was forced to direct the scene over Zoom from the United States. Read how Levy described the experience below.
"Dacre is a good friend and someone I have been a massive fan of since the first line of his Billy self-taped audition. When I read that I got to bring back Billy, I was over the moon. But here's what's crazy: Because COVID scuttled all of our production plans in the midst of an already massively ambitious season, Dacre could not leave Australia to film his scene."
"It was rescheduled again and again and again, and there were lockdowns and protocol updates and more lockdowns and more stringent border restrictions. So with the clock running down, we had no choice but to have me direct over Zoom [with Montgomery] in Australia on a soundstage, while I had already shot the scene in a cemetery with Sadie Sink a year earlier."
"That sequence in episode 4 was one of the biggest Rubik's Cube challenges of my directing career, figuring out how to put Billy in that cemetery with Max, without the ability to put Dacre in the same country as Sadie."
Many productions had to figure out how to work around COVID restrictions to maintain a safe working environment while attempting to create a final product that could have been made in a world pre-pandemic. Levy and the Stranger Things visual and special effects teams managed to direct and film a sequence on the other side of the world and combine that with footage taken nearly a year before with extremely convincing results. Montgomery recently shared behind-the-scenes photographs of the shoot and expressed his gratitude for returning to the show.
Although Max did not truly see Billy, only a vision created by Vecna to taunt her, the moment was an important one as she could finally confront the trauma of losing her brother, a pain she had been struggling with since his brutal death by the Mindflayer six months earlier. It's an effective moment of Max's character proving to be one of the more memorable of season 4 so far. Although Billy is long dead and Vecna's curse on Max is seemingly held at bay, Montgomery may still have a chance to reprise his role one more time when Stranger Things season 4 part 2 hits Netflix on July 1.
Source: EW