A fresh adventure awaits in Stranger Things: Tales From ’85, the animated series from showrunner Eric Robles and executive producers the Duffer Brothers that’s set in the Stranger Things universe.
In this thrilling tale premiering April 23, our heroes Eleven (voiced by Brooklyn Davey Norstedt), Mike (Luca Diaz), Will (Benjamin Plessala), Dustin (Braxton Quinney), Lucas (Elisha “EJ” Williams), and Max (In Your Dreams’s Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) have settled back into a normal life of D&D and quiet days. When something terrifying awakens beneath the snow blanketing the town, the kids must leap back into action to uncover a layered mystery.
Terrifying new monsters will arise in the coming episodes, and a new friend is poised to join the party. Enter Nikki Baxter, the pink-haired transfer student who’s “super punk rock,” says Odessa A’zion (Marty Supreme, I Love LA), who voices the character. Having moved around for the majority of her life, Nikki hasn’t had any real friends until now and had grown accustomed to being on her own.
The D&D enthusiasts play important roles in the group, like Will as the cleric and Mike as the paladin, and Nikki comes in as “the barbarian and the protector [of the crew],” A’zion explains. “They had everything, and she was the missing puzzle piece. You need a little muscle in that crew.”
As the muscle, she “wants to stick up for people who have trouble sticking up for themselves, and I think she’s a badass for that,” A’zion adds.
Get a sneak peek at Hawkins’s newest resident in the new poster below.
“Nikki is the audience’s eyes,” Robles says of the character. “She comes into this world completely new. She’s got her own issues that she’s been dealing with, and it’s these kids who step into her world in a sense.” So when the chaos starts to unfold, “she’s got to figure things out with the kids because there’s no way that she could just walk away [from what she’s seen] and pretend like it never happened.”
Robles and the Duffer Brothers had “big conversations” about introducing the show’s latest recruit, Robles notes, making sure that “not only is the tone for the series what we all want it to be, but the new character feels like an addition to the cast.”
He adds, “It’s not until we found what makes Nikki special to the team, what makes her unique, that we were just like, ‘OK, now we need to go all in.’ ”
Meet Nikki when Stranger Things: Tales From ’85 arrives April 23 on Netflix. Plus, learn more about the new series in this interview with Robles.
