Joyce Byers is seeing double.
Winona Ryder’s epic takedown of the evil Vecna in the final “Stranger Things” season took a lot of manpower — led by her stunt double, Julia Maggio.
“It takes a village to do a scene like that,” she exclusively told The Post.
“Stranger Things” aired its series finale on New Year’s Eve. Set in the ‘80s, the show followed Joyce Byers (Ryder), her son Will (Noah Schnapp), her boyfriend Hopper (David Harbour) and various other kids and friends like Steve (Joe Keery) and Mike (Finn Wolfhard) as they fought sinister supernatural forces, including the evil Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower).
Joyce chopped Vecna’s head off with an axe, as a climactic moment in the finale.
Maggio, who was nominated for an “outstanding stunt performance” Emmy for “Cobra Kai,” recalled, “Joyce, the character…..we had this axe on our back for an entire season. I wondered why. And it was so exciting to show up that day and realize why.”
The stunt performer said that series creators the Duffer brothers hadn’t told her that Joyce would be killing Vecna prior to filming that scene.
“I did not know [that would happen] until we got to set that day. So, it was as surprising to me as other people as well. It was a super fun secret to keep for an entire year, or year and a half before this show came out.”
Maggio, who has also done stunts for “Jessica Jones,” explained that stunts aren’t just about doing an action scene.
“There were a lot of things that went into to making sure that it was safe for Winona to do. That’s the thing about stunts in general — a lot of our work is safety, and testing things out to see who can do what, or how much the actor can do. I got the really fun job of testing out the rig that we had for this.”
She explained that they had “multiple axes” for the scene where Joyce chops off Vecna’s head.
“We had a blunt blade axe on set, as well as a bunch of different prop axes. And we had a bunch of different things of a target for Joyce to hit.”
One of the targets – or the “rig” – that stood in for Vecna was, “this insanely thick jelly. I thought the axe was going to slam straight through this gel for her to hit. And it was so thick… Everybody on set was touching it to see how thick it was.”
She explained that they set the jelly up as a target for Ryder to hit, when she was beheading Vecna.
“It was really cool to work with so many departments to make that moment come to life.”
No stunts were that dangerous or exhausting to handle in the final season, however. If anything, the weather was the most tiring.
“The crazy night shoots that we did for episode four. It was July, it was summer. And as you see for Joyce, she’s wearing a very thick jacket,” she told The Post. “So we were in the July heat together, in this jacket and it was very hot running around.”
That episode ended with a climactic battle, where Will revealed that he had “sorcerer” power.
“We were shooting for 13 hour days, this entire huge casting crew to make these amazing scenes come to life,” she recalled.
When she joined “Stranger Things” in Season 5, Maggio went to several wardrobe and wig fittings. But she didn’t know that she had secured the job until an encounter with the creators.
“The Duffer brothers came up behind me and put an arm around me and said, ‘Good morning, Winona.’ And I turned around, I was like, ‘hi, my name’s Julia. I’m her stunt double today.’ And they looked at me and were like, ‘This is gonna work.’”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
