It’s a Stranger time for Eduardo Franco.

The 23-year-old Mexican–American comedic actor has joined the cast of Netflix’s mega hit series Stranger Things for the upcoming fourth season.

Franco has been named a new series regular alongside Jamie Campbell Bower and Joseph Quinn.

Set to recur in Season 4 are  Tom Wlaschiha, Sherman Augustus, Mason Dye, Nikola Djuricko and Robert Englund.

The title of Season 4’s opening episode is The Hellfire Club. Earlier this month, Stranger Things’ Twitter account started teasing the club, raising speculations among fans about what kind of club it is. The description of Quinn’s character Eddie Munson provides an answer. Eddie is an audacious 80’s metalhead who runs The Hellfire Club, Hawkins High’s official D&D club. Hated by those who don’t understand him — and beloved by those who do — Eddie will find himself at the terrifying epicenter of this season’s mystery.

A psychiatric hospital will be a setting in Season 4 with two of the new characters tied to it.

Series regular Bower will play Peter Ballard, a caring man who works as an orderly at a psychiatric hospital. Tired of the brutality he witnesses day after day, will Peter finally take a stand?

Recurring player Englund will play Victor Creel, a disturbed and intimidating man who is imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for a gruesome murder in the 1950s.

Season 4 will feature two new Russian characters, none of them played by Russians.

In the first Season 4 teaser, released in February, “The American” (aka Jim Hopper), was seen in a Russian labor camp in the snowy wasteland of Kamchatka, “where he will face dangers both human…and other,” per the series creators, the Duffer brothers.

German actor Wlaschiha will play Dmitri, a Russian prison guard who befriends Hopper. Dmitri is smart, cunning, and charming… but can he be trusted?

Serbian actor Djuricko will play Yuri, a seedy and unpredictable Russian smuggler who loves bad jokes, cold hard cash, and crunchy style peanut butter.

In other developments, Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) is getting a new best friend, Argyle (Franco), a fun-loving stoner who proudly delivers delicious pizza pies for Surfer Boy Pizza.

The remaining new characters, both recurring, are:

• Lt. Colonel Sullivan, played by Augustus. An intelligent, no-nonsense man who believes he knows how to stop the evil in Hawkins once and for all….
• Jason Carver (Dye). Jason seemingly has it all — he’s handsome, he’s rich, he’s a sports star, and he’s dating the most popular girl in school. But as a new evil threatens Hawkins, Jason’s perfect world begins to unravel…

Per the Duffers, in Season 4, “a new horror is beginning to surface, something long buried, something that connects everything.” The season will feature a fourth new series regular, Brett Gelman, who was promoted after recurring as Hopper’s conspiracy theorist friend Murray Bauman in seasons 2–3.

At the end of Season 3, following the explosion, aimed at destroying the Soviet lab to the Upside Down deep under the new Starcourt Mall, Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) is seen taking her sons (Charlie Heaton, Noah Schnapp) and Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) out of the Indiana town to start a new life. There is a jump in geography in the final scene, which takes place in the far Eastern end of the USSR where guards are feeding a prisoner to an imprisoned Demogorgon, but “not the American.”

Stranger Things was in the early stages of filming Season 4 when Netflix on March 13 suspended film and TV production in the face of the escalating coronavirus pandemic. The hugely popular supernatural drama resumed filming Sept. 28 in Georgia.

Netflix renewed Stranger Things for a fourth season in September 2019 when it also closed a major overall deal with the Duffer Brothers. The three-time Emmy nominee for Best Drama is one of Netflix’s most watched titles, with Season 3 alone amassing 40.7 million household accounts in its first four days — more than any other Netflix film or series in that timeframe — and 64 million member households in the first four weeks.

Created by Matt and Ross Duffer, Stranger Things is produced by Monkey Massacre Productions & 21 Laps Entertainment. The twin brothers serve as writers, directors, executive producers and showrunners on the series alongside executive producer/director Shawn Levy.