Joe Keery

Joe Keery worked serving burgers at a Chicago restaurant while racking up more than a hundred rejections in commercial auditions. In 2014, he had just graduated from DePaul University, and his agent barely managed to get him into fast-food ads or three-line parts in police series shot in Illinois.

When he sent in a cellphone-recorded tape for a mystery project titled Montauk, the Duffer brothers were looking for a high school bully with an early expiration date. The character was named Steve Harrington.

The original plan was to kill him off before the final episode.

But the creators decided to rewrite the scripts on the fly because he had a strange, somewhat comical vocal rhythm that was hard to typecast. That decision in the summer of 2015 changed the shooting schedule and put an unlikable supporting character at the center of Stranger Things over ten years and five seasons.

Overnight, his hairstyle filled press photos and online forums. Keery was suddenly branded a comedic heartthrob in an industry eager to typecast any young face that works on screen.

The Need to Mess Up the Hair

In 2020, he chose to break away from the protective boy-next-door image of Hawkins by accepting the role of Kurt Kunkle in Spree. The film cost less than $2 million and required him to spend weeks shouting at cell phones while driving a car around Los Angeles.

Playing a rideshare driver who murders his passengers to gain online followers was a bold move. And it paid off. It showed an actor capable of portraying contemporary hysteria without seeking the audience's complicity.

In 2021, he joined Free Guy, a blockbuster with a $120 million budget in which he shared scenes with Ryan Reynolds. Keery played Keys, a shy, cerebral programmer far removed from the stunts of mainstream action movies.

No one in the studio saw the next detour coming.

Djo's mask and the snow of Fargo

Between shoots, Keery holed up in hotel rooms with a cheap keyboard and a microphone. In Chicago he had played drums with the psychedelic band Post Animal, but in 2019 he chose to release solo music under the alias Djo so his TV name wouldn't shape how people listened.

In 2022, he released the album Decide, recorded with engineer Adam Thein at Sound City Studios. In early 2024, the track "End of Beginning" surpassed one billion streams across platforms and climbed to the top spots of the Billboard Hot 100 without any marketing campaigns behind it.

The actor avoided promotional interviews and didn't organize massive tours to game the algorithm. He preferred to travel to Calgary, where it was 20 degrees below zero, to join the fifth season of Fargo, which aired from late 2023 into early 2024.

So Keery perfected a Minnesota accent, reduced his gestures to a minimum, and built Gator Tillman, a pathetic, armed deputy sheriff who seeks the approval of an authoritarian father played by Jon Hamm.

In 2024, he released Marmalade and took part in Pavements, the film about the 1990s indie rock band directed by Alex Ross Perry. For that shoot, he learned the band's repertoire note for note without using hand doubles.

In 2025, he wrapped his run on Stranger Things after eight months of filming in Atlanta and completed production on the feature film Cold Storage directed by Jonny Campbell, whose shoot in Morocco required sixteen hours a day of facial prosthetics and a $67 million insurance policy.