‘Stranger Things’ Season 5 Adds Linda Hamilton To Cast

Actress Linda Hamilton has joined the cast of Stranger Things.

The Terminator star announced in a video message played at Netflix‘s Tudum fan event in Sao Paulo that she will be featured in Season 5. No further details on her role were shared.

Hamilton’s clip was introduced by her Terminator co-star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was in attendance at the event to announce the renewal of his show FUBAR.

You can watch the clip of Hamilton’s announcement above.

Netflix announced in February 2022 that the fifth season of Stranger Things would be its last. The show’s fourth season, which premiered in May 2022, became Netflix’s biggest season of an English-language series to date. According to The Hollywood Reporter, it garnered 1.35 billion hours of viewing over its first 28 days and maintained a spot in the streamer’s top 10 rankings for 19 weeks.

Stranger Things, which is set in the 1980s, has mentioned The Terminator before in one of its pop culture references — just not Hamilton’s role specifically.

In Season 3, the Soviet assassin Grigori (Andrey Ivchenko) was styled to look like the Terminator and Cary Elwes’ character even refers to him as “Arnold Schwarzenegger” at one point.

In addition to Elwes, Hamilton joins a cast that includes Winona Ryder, Matthew Modine, Sean Astin, Paul Reiser and Robert Englund.

Production on Season 5 had not yet begun when the Writers Guild of America went on strike in May, therefore we are likely more than a year away from the show’s final installment dropping on Netflix.

Series co-creators and co-showrunners Matt Duffer and Ross Duffer, known as the Duffer brothers, revealed in early May that it “is not possible” to start production on the Netflix series without their writers.

In November of 2022, Ross Duffer described the final season as “a culmination of all of the seasons, so it’s sort of got a little bit from each, whereas before each season was distinct — three, this is our big summer blockbuster season with our big monster; four was the psychological horror. I think that what we’re trying to do is go back to the beginning a little bit in the tone of [season] one, but scale-wise it’s more in line with what [season] four is. Hopefully it’s got a little bit of everything.”

Hamilton last reprised her role as Sarah Connor in 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate. She also recurs on Syfy’s Resident Alien and appears in TNT’s Claws.