During his July 25 appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” the “Stranger Things” actor revealed he was “held up” by immigration while entering New York. That is, until the immigration officers recognized him as Eddie Munson from the hit Netflix series. “I very nearly didn’t make it,” Quinn explained on “The Tonight Show.” “I was taken into, I guess what you could call it more of a dungeon. And I was asked to wait there for about 20 minutes and then I was summoned to this desk where someone asked me, ‘What are you doing in the United States, sir?’” Quinn continued, “I said, ‘I’m actually here to meet Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show.”‘ And he didn’t believe me.”
Yet another officer quickly saw who Quinn was, the actor claimed. “And one of his colleagues looked over at him, looked at me, and said: ‘Leave Eddie alone!,’” Quinn said. “And then [the colleague] said, ‘It’s Eddie from “Stranger Things,”‘ and he was like, ‘You’re Eddie Munson?’”
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He concluded, “[The man asked] ‘Do you come back next season?’ I was like, ‘I don’t know,’ and he said, ‘You better,’ and gave me my passport.”
IndieWire has reached out to U.S. Immigration for comment.
Per IndieWire’s own Proma Khosla, Eddie’s future seems bleak. “Eddie Munson (Joseph Quinn), newcomer and fans’ Season 4 favorite, went out in a blaze of glory, decimated by otherworldly bats while he bought time to save everyone else,” Khosla wrote. “In fact, he died the exact death that almost befell Steve (Joe Keery) in ‘Volume 1,’ but the Duffer brothers wouldn’t dream of killing Steve — or any of its other longtime leads, it seems — with another season left to go.”
Khosla added that Eddie’s arc was created “only to destroy” his character and “quickly dispose” of him.
That big finale set to Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” was almost too well-written to be true, according to Quinn. “I was away from home and I read the script at about 3:00 a.m. when it came in and I couldn’t sleep,” the actor told Esquire earlier this year. “I was like, ‘Who the fuck do they think they are coming up with something this good?!’”
Quinn confirmed that he “had no idea, really” that Eddie would perish by the end of Season 4. “I knew that I wasn’t optioned. I had a feeling that we would finish his arc this season,” Quinn explained. “I couldn’t have imagined the manner in which he would leave, but yeah, I think it’s a weird thing. It’s kind of bittersweet. I would love to go back to that set and to see those people again. But sometimes there’s a beautiful arc that they’ve written and he’s such an empathetically written role and they’re very rare, these kind of roles.”
Quinn summed up, “It feels a little bit like a lottery ticket and I feel incredibly grateful, but it’s a shame not to be able to come back. Onwards.”
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