[This story contains spoilers from Stranger Things season five, Volume 1.]
Cara Buono has seen Karen Wheeler go through a lot over the course of Stranger Things. She unwittingly harbored a fugitive science experiment in her basement. She flirted with a hot, teenage lifeguard. She sported more stellar 1980s hairstyles than there are seasons of the Netflix mega-hit series.
But, prior to the first drop of episodes from the fifth and final season, she never had a clue what was really going on with her children or in her monster-infested town. That changed with Stranger Things 5 episode two, “The Vanishing of…,” during which she gets into a gruesome altercation with a Demogorgon — those nasty little pieces of work with flower-shaped heads full of teeth.
Face covered in streaked mascara and brandishing a broken wine bottle, Karen puts up a hell of fight protecting daughter Holly (Nell Fisher) before getting mauled within an inch of her life. But Karen Wheeler lives! And, per Buono, she’s still got at least one more hairstyle to reveal before the book closes on Stranger Things after its Dec. 31 finale. She recently hopped on a Zoom to talk about her big turn, her character’s unlimited supply of wine in a town now cut off from the world and her thoughts on another great character from her formidable resume, Mad Men‘s Dr. Faye Miller.
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The way your fight plays out on screen, it really looks like Karen is toast. What was your reaction when you saw the script?
We were waiting for the scripts for so long. The only thing I knew about the season was this idea that it was going to circle back to the feeling of season one with the OG characters. We’re under quarantine, it’s smaller. And the Duffers told me that they had always planned for Karen to have a really important moment — and that had to be a fight. I was excited. But I did not see that coming.
What is the protocol on the show when someone gets killed off? It hasn’t happened much, but it has happened. Do they get much of a heads up?
Well, I knew I wasn’t going to die because I knew there was a thing in future we talked about that had to do with a hair change. (Laughs.) Those things take some time to construct, but I think there was some surprise that I do survive it because I’m cut through and through.
It is so gnarly.
It’s really gruesome. When Millie [Bobby Brown] comes in with Natalia [Dyer], Natalia looked down at me and turned to the Duffers and said, “How does she live? How does she survive? Do not kill off Karen Wheeler! She needs to carry on after this. She needs to tell her story what happened. She needs to tell the moms at the pool.”
The whole thing is kind of symbolic of how there’s no longer avoiding the threat they’ve been living with for so long, because Karen and Ted [Joe Chrest] were two characters who just remained oblivious.
Suddenly Karen’s thrust into the unbelievable. This whole time, she’s been in denial and drinking her wine. One of the ways I justified her being the quintessential clueless ’80s mom was by asking for her to be drinking as often as possible. I think it’s nice that now she becomes a part of the mythology of Hawkins. She’s now woven into the actual story. In terms of filming, it was really fun. I had started boxing back in 2018, and I really love sparring. When this moment came up, I just thought, “Here’s a way for me to be using some of my boxing work with the help of a wine bottle.”
How much wine is Karen drinking and what type of wine does she prefer?
Definitely white. Always white, because her rug is white in the living room and she doesn’t want to spill. It’s a little less of a hangover than red. I would say, chardonnay. How much does she drink? Let’s say she had maybe a glass with dinner during season one. Then, as things progressed, after the whole Billy thing, she was probably secretly up to a bottle a night to try to anesthetize that feeling. She’s also wondering, where did Billy go? (Billy being the aforementioned lifeguard played by Dacre Montgomery.) She has no one to talk to about it. I always said she’s kind of a high-functioning closet alcoholic. It was my way to try to justify the immense denial and cluelessness that she embodied.
The bathtub sequence at the top of episode two is really fun to watch, probably less so to film. How much time did you spend in the water?
I had a rehearsal day of the tank with Nell Fisher, who plays Holly, so we got to get used to the water and how long we could hold our breath. There were a lot of safety issues, but we actually had so much fun figuring out how to balance our bodies. You’re buoyant. You need a weight belt to keep from floating up. The first day was really cold, then it was like a hot tub. We joked they were trying to boil us while we were filming it.
How have you processed all of the time passing on this show? It’s somehow much weirder to see you as the mother of adults than seeing you with a baby in the first season.
They are adults! There comes that time in every actress’ life where they start getting the offers for moms. There’s a panic that sets in like, “Wait, they think I’m old enough to have a baby?” And not, like, 16 with a baby. The way I approach it is just… let’s make it interesting. What can I make interesting about this person? Making her drink, giving her an edge or sometimes changing lines. A lot of times, people write scripts and it’ll say, “I was your age once” or “You can talk to me.” I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a script where they say that. I have never said anything like that to my daughter in my entire life.
When done correctly, the mom roles can be really rich.
Look at the movies Nicole Kidman has played recently, like Babygirl. This what happens to a woman when she starts putting herself second or third. There’s so much that is silently happening, and that’s a great way to express it. I got to explore that in season three when Billy comes to the door and goes, “Oh, are you Nancy’s sister?” She’s been losing herself in the romance novels, and somebody sees her all of a sudden. There’s a lot more exploration of that unrecognized interior life these days. Obviously, there’s so much that there’s never been revealed of Karen Wheeler. So you have to find ways to express inner life and a history — hopefully show a depth, something that people connect to. The best shows that we see over the years, and particularly in Stranger Things, even with much smaller parts, every actor who’s played even smaller character is so well cast and so convincing and so complete.
This is a shallow turn, but you had some incredible sartorial and hair moments over the seasons. Do you have a favorite Karen look?
I love Karen’s hair and makeup. Season one, when I got the role, I worked with my colorist in New York. We kept trying to make the mousy brown, perfectly that shade, one foot stuck in the seventies. Then I used a wig because it killed my hair— except season three when I was going to the pool. I didn’t want to risk any malfunctions. My gosh, the blue eyeshadow in the pool? That doesn’t come off. I love my wig in season four. Then it gets a little sad looking in season five because they’re under quarantine without a lot of access to the good hair products.
If the town is under quarantine, where is the wine coming from?
There’s a black market in Hawkins, and Karen knows where to get the wine. (Laughs.) She’s focused on the wine, maybe some nail polish, and there’s someone who’s got a truck coming in with all that. I created a whole world of accessing the contraband. She’s smoking cigarettes in the garage, waiting. Because she also has mascara! That was really important to me. I loved how we made the mascara streak in a very specific way after she got out of the bathtub for that fight. Listen, I love the looks and the bigger hair. I got to do it on The Sopranos, Mad Men and now this.
I’m glad you brought up Mad Men. Do you ever think about Dr. Faye? Few characters were done dirtier on that show.
Right? When he decided to compromise her work ethic and sneak [Don Draper] a little bone about one of the other account she was on, she succumbed to his charm and all of that. But I had hoped that we would’ve seen Dr. Faye come back or just have him run into her somewhere. I would’ve loved to have seen her triumph. I don’t know what we thought had happened. I mean, I think she went on to be pretty amazing and successful and powerful and not suffer from breaking up with Don Draper. I would’ve loved to have seen. I really wanted to see a scene between her and my Elizabeth Moss’s character, Peggy. They could have worked together.
Before I let you go, how do you feel about the way the show ends?
I love the physical transformation that happens for Karen, which I think you’ll really get a kick out of. I can’t talk about that now, but I think ending any show is very difficult. There’s a lot of pressure to wrap it up and you can’t make everybody happy. But I really truly believe the Duffers did an amazing job making it as satisfying and doing right by all the characters and story. They cared so much about it. There’s a lot of crying. For me, personally, I’ve been on some amazing shows, and I think this will go down as perhaps my most meaningful. I watched these kids grow up. My daughter grew up on the show. It feels like closing a chapter in a family I grew up with. It’s a tough goodbye, but I’m really proud of how to have been a part of it and how it’s going to end. That connection with the fans, I think will live on. And that’s really nice.
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Season five of Stranger Things is releasing in three parts: Volume 1 (consisting of four episodes) is now streaming on Netflix, Volume 2 releases on Christmas (three episodes) and The Finale on New Year’s Eve. Check out THR‘s season five coverage here.
