When Elodie Grace Orkin signed on to play Eleven’s high school bully, Angela, in Stranger Things 4, she had a tough task ahead of her, full of cruel lines and one particularly gruesome scene. She delivered in spades, though, and immediately after Season 4, Volume 1 came out, the internet erupted with memes celebrating Angela’s gory downfall and wishing even worse for the villainous character after she was so mean to poor El. To Orkin, that’s a sign of a job well done.
“Honestly, I was expecting a lot more hate because Angela is such a terrible person,” Orkin tells Elite Daily. “I’ve gotten a little bit on social media, but mostly it’s been ‘I hated your character so much, which means you did a good job,’ so I’ve taken that as a compliment.”
Warning: Spoilers for Stranger Things Season 4, Volume 1 follow. The beginning of Stranger Things Season 4 kicked off with the group of trauma-bonded besties attempting to live normal lives — with Eleven, Will, Jonathan, and Joyce in California, Hopper presumed dead (but actually in the USSR), and the rest of the crew still in Hawkins. Of them, Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) was having the hardest time, grieving the presumed loss of Hopper, contending with losing her powers, missing her first love, Mike, and struggling to adapt to a school environment all while getting harassed by Angela, a popular girl who got pleasure from torturing Eleven in front of her classmates. And while fans’ response to Angela didn’t turn out to be so bad, one person’s reaction to all the bullying hit different for Orkin.
“I saw an interview recently where Millie said that it was hard for her to be bullied and I felt so horribly bad about it,” Orkin tells Elite Daily. “I tried to be as lovely as possible to her outside of filming, apologizing and saying, ‘I swear to God, I’m not like this in real life.’”
Of course, Angela got her comeuppance in the show. One of the most tweeted-about moments from Volume 1 came when Eleven finally snapped under Angela’s torture, sending a heavy roller skate right between Angela’s eyes. The smack heard ‘round the world was celebrated by fans, but getting smashed in the face with a roller skate, even with movie magic, was a grueling process for Orkin.
“Millie’s stunt double threw the skate so close to my face to make it look real, like an inch away, which honestly was really scary because I was sure at some point she was actually going to hit my face,” Orkin says. “Obviously there was a stunt double who actually hit the ground because it was such an intense physical scene, so they had to help us out with that.”
To create Angela’s gnarly head wound, the makeup team went in on Orkin with a ton of fake blood, which looked a little too realistic for Orkin’s liking. “I felt sick to my stomach at some points because it looked so real,” she says. “I almost felt the pain, like my mind was tricking itself saying, ‘Do I actually have a head gash?’ I got a little squeamish.”
Although it’d be cathartic to see what happens next for Angela — whether she’s learned from her mistakes or the head-bashing only galvanized her to be even meaner — Orkin can’t divulge whether she’s ever returning to Stranger Things. She does, however, have a warning for fans ahead of the Season 4’s final two episodes. “If you thought the last seven episodes were intense, then I don’t know how you’re going to handle these last two episodes,” Orkin says. “They are really, really intense.”
Stranger Things 4, Vol. 2 premieres July 1 on Netflix.
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