Cara Buono with Joe Chrest in 'Stranger Things' season five. COURTESY OF NETFLIX (C) 2025 Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text [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. Related Stories TV 'Stranger Things 5' Scores Netflix's Second Biggest Premiere Week Ever for a Series Movies 'Stranger Things' Series Finale Runtime, Movie Theater Locations Revealed 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. ***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. Dacre Montgomery (Billy Hargrove) with Cara Buono (Karen Wheeler) in one of Stranger Things' more memorable arcs. Netflix 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