The TV character death that crushed Jack Black: “He was the best”
Though he’s most well-known as a big movie star, Jack Black has also brought his unique energy to TV. One of his earliest screen roles was on an episode of The Fall Guy in the mid-1980s, and he would feature on shows like Touched by an Angel and The X-Files before making it big. He’s mainly interested in making film adaptations of video games, but he returned to the small screen for an episode of Rick and Morty in 2022 and The Mandalorian in 2023.
He might not be on telly very much anymore, but he’s still clearly a big fan of the medium. Speaking to Netflix Geeked in 2022, Black revealed that he and his son Tommy had recently been catching on Stranger Things, about a decade after the rest of the world. To be fair, he’s been a lot busier than most of the population.
“I was geeking out pretty hard,” he said, clearly very aware of who he was speaking to. “Then I was like, ‘Why did you kill the heavy metal guy? He was the best character.” He is, of course, referring to Eddie Munson, the loveable metalhead who joined the show in the fourth season. Played by Joseph Quinn, Eddie appears as the leader of the Hellfire Club, Hawkins High School’s Dungeons and Dragons Society.
He might have only featured in a single season, but Eddie will go down in history as one of the most beloved characters in the whole series. In the big finale, ‘The Piggyback’, he allows his friends to escape the clutches of Vecna by distracting his minions in the most metal way possible, playing a gnarly rendition of Metallica’s monster track ‘Master of Puppets’. Quinn put in a lot of practice to make this moment look convincing, even receiving help from Tye Trujillo, son of Metallica bass player Robert Trujillo.
It should come as no surprise that Black was a big fan of Eddie’s character. The actor is a noted heavy metal fan, leading up the band Tenacious D and playing many characters with a love of the genre. Your mind might immediately go to Dewey Finn from School of Rock, but real ones will remember his role as Eddie Riggs from the video game Brütal Legend. He also has a connection to the band behind ‘Master of Puppets’. The song ‘Tribute’, Tenacious D’s biggest hit, was written by his bandmate Kyle Gass about the song ‘One’ from Metallica’s fourth album, …And Justice for All.
As it stands, the episode in which Eddie sacrifices himself is the most recent edition of Stranger Things. Fans have been waiting for the fifth season of the show since 2022, with various delays, including the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strikes, pushing the series back further and further. Filming finally concluded in December 2024, with new episodes expected to be released at some point in 2025. Just how the show will cope now that their ‘child stars’ are all grown up (Millie Bobby Brown is married now, for crying out loud) remains to be seen.
If Eddie had lived a little longer, he could have easily grown up to be someone like Jack Black. It’s nice to know that the genuine article has a great deal of affection for his fictional counterpart, even if it did end in heartbreak.
