Entertainment

Stranger Things’ Barb backs show’s young cast to become Hollywood’s biggest stars

She dubbed them the next generation’s Meryl Streeps and Leonardo DiCaprios.
She dubbed them the next generation’s Meryl Streeps and Leonardo DiCaprios. She dubbed them the next generation’s Meryl Streeps and Leonardo DiCaprios.

Stranger Things actress Shannon Purser has backed the hit sci-fi show’s young cast to become some of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Purser, who portrayed the popular Barbara “Barb” Holland in series one of the hit Netflix drama, labelled the show’s teenage stars “our next Meryl Streeps and Leonardo DiCaprios”.

Her comments came as the second series of the show arrived on Netflix, with dozens of fans in central London taking part in a “binge race” – watching all nine episodes in one sitting inside Topshop’s flagship store on Oxford Street.

The hit Netflix show returns to the streaming service days ahead of Halloween, more than a year after it debuted in July 2016, and will see its ensemble cast – including Caleb McLaughlin, 16, Finn Wolfhard, 14, Millie Bobby Brown, 13, and Gaten Matarazzo, 15 – back in their roles as the residents of fictional town Hawkins, Indiana.

Purser, 20, does not appear in the second series but said she was “proud” of the work her younger co-stars had achieved.

She told the Press Association: “I just remember watching them work in season one and being so impressed.

“It’s really wonderful, and yeah I think they all have a great future, they’re all so talented and they are like what, 13, 14, 15?”

“I think there’s something so encouraging about seeing the next generation of these young kids who are going to be our next Meryl Streeps and Leonardo DiCaprios”.

Noah Schnapp (Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP)

Set in 1983, the first series told the tale of the disappearance of 12-year-old Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) and how his friends, his unsettled mother Joyce (Winona Ryder) and his brother Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) try to find him.

The second series picks up a year after the horrific events of the first, and sees the Hawkins residents struggle to come to terms with what they went through.

On the show’s success, Purser said: “It’s a unique show, it’s science fiction, it’s a little bit of horror. I don’t think anyone anticipated that it would have this universal love that it’s gathered.

“But everybody seems to find something to love about it which is really amazing.”

:: Stranger Things is available to stream on Netflix.