Warning: This article contains discussion of suicide and spoilers for Stranger Things season 4, vol 1.
While Stranger Things couldn’t get Billy actor Dacre Montgomery into the same country, let alone the same set, as his co-stars for the actor’s appearance, this only improved the atmosphere of season 4’s creepiest cameo. Despite being the main antagonist of season 3, returning villain Billy’s Stranger Things season 4 cameo is one of the outing’s most moving moments. In Max’s lowest moment, the monstrous Vecna takes the form of her dead half-brother and goads her into embracing death.
It is a brutally cruel scene that confirms Max’s suicidal thoughts in the wake of Billy’s death, and features some of supporting star Sadie Sink’s best work on the series so far. Taking place at the climax of “Dear Billy” (season 4, episode 4), Max’s confrontation with Billy/Vecna has been hailed as a high point of the season. However, not only did the scene almost not happen, but the issues with achieving the sequence ended up playing into its success.
According to director Shawn Levy, Billy’s actor Dacre Montgomery was unable to leave his home country Australia to film his brief return due to COVID restrictions. Stranger Things season 4 guest stars like Robert Englund and Jamie Campbell Bower were able to shoot their scenes despite COVID restrictions thanks to their residence in the US, but the fact that Montgomery lives in Australia forced the creators to shoot his appearance via Zoom. While this doesn’t impair the performance, the logistics of shooting the scene add another layer of distance between Montgomery’s character and Sadie Sink’s Max, further foreshadowing the fact that it’s not the real Billy appearing in Stranger Things season 4, but rather Vecna using his likeness to trap Max.
The scene has an uncanny, vaguely off atmosphere wherein Max and Billy’s eye lines don’t quite match, and their dialogue overlaps a little. These elements are subtle enough to feel intentional on first viewing, but upon seeing Levy outline the problems Stranger Things season 4 faced when shooting, it becomes clear that a lot of this comes from technical issues. Per Levy, “Because COVID scuttled all of our production plans in the midst of an already massively ambitious season, Dacre could not leave Australia to film his scene. It was rescheduled again and again and again, and there were lockdowns and protocol updates and more lockdowns and more stringent border restrictions. So with the clock running down, we had no choice but to have me direct over Zoom [with Montgomery] in Australia on a soundstage, while I had already shot the scene in a cemetery with Sadie Sink a year earlier.”
It would be tough for even a seasoned reviewer to note these issues at first glance, but the off-kilter tone of the scene makes much more sense with this behind-the-scenes context. Montgomery’s unhinged Billy was frequently at odds with Max (and everyone else) throughout his time in Stranger Things seasons 2 and 3, making his tranquil cruelty in the scene feel ill-fitting and out-of-character. A lot of what made Billy such a major threat to the character was his hair-trigger temper, which is entirely absent when the callous, emotionless Stranger Things villain Vecna is pretending to be him. Knowing that Montgomery was literally in a different country to Sink and responding to her lines over a year after she filmed them makes the real-life source of this distance more obvious but, far from taking viewers out of the scene, the detail only makes the Stranger Things scene more effective on a rewatch.
