How ‘Stranger Things’ quite literally became Joseph Quinn’s get out of jail free card
If it feels like you’ve been seeing a lot of Joseph Quinn lately, you’re not alone, given that the British star has been all over some of the biggest movies of the past few years.
From playing a maniacal Roman emperor in Gladiator II to the most recent incarnation of The Human Torch, the 31-year-old has achieved more in his short life than many performers twice his age, and all this is before his appearance as George Harrison in the upcoming Beatles movies.
However, what really took Quinn to the next level was Stranger Things, where in the first episode of season four, the world met Eddie Munson, the hard-rocking, Dungeons & Dragons-playing leader (and primary member) of the ‘Hellfire Club’. In a show packed with great characters, Eddie quickly became a fan favourite, with his run culminating in an epic performance of Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’ to distract the evil Vecna, leading to one of the greatest and saddest sacrifices in TV history.
Eddie’s selflessness not only benefitted the series but had some unexpected consequences for his actor, too. Speaking to Jimmy Fallon, Quinn revealed that he very nearly missed the taping because he’d been detained at an airport as the security officer didn’t believe that he was famous and was about to throw the book at him, when good ol’ Eddie came to the rescue.
“One of his colleagues looked over at him, looked at me, and said: ‘Leave Eddie alone!’” he remembered, “Then said, ‘It’s Eddie from Stranger Things‘, and he was like, ‘You’re Eddie Munson?’ He asked, ‘Do you come back next season?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know,’ and he said, ‘You better’, and gave me my passport.”
This wouldn’t be the first time an actor from a popular fantasy show used their character to get out of a sticky situation, where, in 2016, Kit Harrington revealed that he had bartered a Game of Thrones plotline with a police officer to avoid a speeding ticket. The actor was pulled over by a fan of the show who said he could get him off the hook if he revealed whether or not Jon Snow returned from the dead in season six, and Harrington promptly let him know that he did, to which the officer simply replied, “On your way, Lord Commander”.
The incident Quinn described took place in 2022, the same year that season four hit Netflix, and so that poor airport officer would have to wait another three years to find out whether his favourite character actually survived Vecna’s wrath.
The fifth and final season of Stranger Things, which premiered just a few days ago at the time of writing, is the last chance for Eddie to make a comeback, and look, if you think I’m spoiling Stranger Things and running the risk of being mobbed in the streets by its insane fanbase, then you’ve got another thing coming.
While famous people should be subjected to the same level of justice as we regular folks, what Quinn got away with sounds pretty harmless, unless he was smuggling something insidious into the country, in which case that security guard has a lot of questions to answer.
