Is the guy who plays Eddie Munson British?

The way Joe Quinn tells it, it was suspiciously easy landing a role on Stranger Things. He sent in a grand total of two self-tapes in character as Eddie Munson—a showy metalhead with big hair and an even bigger obsession with Dungeons and Dragons. Shortly afterward, he got a congratulatory call from his agent. No endless rounds of auditions; no chemistry reads; no flying in from his native London to meet the Duffer brothers in person. Just two tapes, and he was cast on one of the biggest shows in the world. 

“They just kind of gave it to me, which is bad,” he deadpans. “Normally, things are pretty gladiatorial in this game.”

Quinn would know, having been an actor for more than a decade. The 28-year-old studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and was promptly funneled through the drama school to period piece pipeline, appearing in a slew of TV shows that couldn’t be more British if they tried. There was Dickensian, a BBC miniseries focused on characters from Charles Dickens’s oeuvre. There was Howard’s End, based on the E.M. Forster novel. In between, he had a single episode of Game of Thrones, in which he played a soldier for House Stark. Did his stint on the fantasy HBO series, a juggernaut with an obsessive global audience, prepare him even a little bit to dive into the sprawling world of Stranger Things?

“I don’t think anything could have prepared me for it,” he says. “I only did two days on [Thrones]. It was obviously mad to be on something of that scale, but this one was much more collaborative. Apples and oranges.” 

On the surface, Quinn seems a surprising choice to play Eddie. Over video chat, he’s self-deprecating and wry, put-together in a collared shirt and a simple silver chain, his wavy hair cut short and pushed away from his face. But he transforms as Eddie, the charismatic leader of the D&D-loving Hellfire Club. Eddie jumps on cafeteria tables and generally loves to cause a ruckus, eagerly bullying club newbies Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo). He also lends the role an air of vulnerability, leaning in to the quieter moments when Eddie’s rough home life and drug-dealing side hustle are revealed. 

To prepare for the role, Quinn began listening to Black Sabbath and familiarized himself with Dungeons and Dragons, as Eddie is the show’s resident Dungeon Master. He smiles and clasps his hands when asked how he feels about the game now. “I’m lovingly neutral,” he says diplomatically. “[I] wasn’t going crazy playing it. Probably won’t anytime soon.”

To find Eddie’s look, Quinn lost weight because he “wanted [Eddie] to look younger,” he says with a laugh, “and I’m not 18, unfortunately, anymore!” He also did a series of hair fittings to find the right wig, trying to rein in the show’s ambitious stylists. “They wanted to go full David Bowie, Labyrinth insanity,” he says. “Unfortunately, I don’t have the bone structure for that.”

Most importantly, he worked with vocal coach to perfect his American accent. It was not only his first time working on an American show, but also his first time ever playing an American character—so the pressure was on. Between takes, he would keep talking in the accent to his co-stars. (Two of them, Millie Bobby Brown and Charlie Heaton, are also British.) 

“You feel like a sociopath just turning up in people’s native country and doing this voice,” he says. He would also test out his chops after leaving the set. “I would take the accent out for dinner and order in an American accent and feel insane. But it’s better to look like an idiot in front of your friends than, you know, loads of people.”

Despite being a newcomer, Quinn felt surprisingly at home with the Stranger Things cast. “They’re not nearly as bad as you think,” he says cheekily. “No, they’re lovely people. They’ve been through this crazy tumble dryer of fame and are very galvanized because of it.”

There was no hazing, no secret rituals he had to learn to keep up and blend in. Maya Hawke would lead everyone in rounds of the multiplayer gaming app Spy, while Brown would crush her castmates in Fruit by the Foot eating competitions. People would send each other silly Photoshopped images and tell endless jokes, “saying anything possible to make each other laugh, all the time,” Quinn says. 

“There was no grandiosity from the [Duffer] brothers, or from the cast members,“ he says. “The roots of it are very humble. They were the underdog… and it definitely felt like it’s very much rooted in those sensibilities still.”

Quinn also offers nothing but a buffet of increasingly creative compliments when asked about his most frequent scene partners. When asked about Matarazzo, he says the 19-year-old has the charm of a “45-year-old restaurateur from New Jersey,” the kind of guy who goes around each table making sure everyone’s having a nice time. “I could go on for ages about him,” he says. “He has this ability to make everyone feel at home.”

When asked about Joe Keery, who plays funny hearthrob Steve Harrington—a frenemy to Eddie as they battle to be Dustin’s older brother figure—he beams. “There’s no flies on him,” he says. “There’s nothing wrong with that little fucker! He’s just the best.”

He’s similarly complimentary about the Duffers, the twin creators who also write and direct much of the series. “Watching them work is intriguing,” he says of the two, who are introspective and quiet. “They can communicate to each other without speaking.”

Their most frequent note to Quinn would just be to say the lines faster, he recalls with a laugh. Otherwise, they were fairly hands off. “They’re very trusting,” Quinn says. “They expect you to be the character.” So that’s what he did. 

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