Unresolved, Unforgettable:
Linnea Berthelsen on playing Stranger Things’ Kali
Words by: Carolina Fernandez Bold
Few characters divide audiences quite like Kali.
First introduced as the runaway from Hawkins’ lab who hunts down her old abusers, she is a character driven by an uncompromising, vigilante sense of justice. She can manipulate perception with her super powers. And she has a tendency to manipulate the people around her, even the ones she cares about.
“I knew what I was stepping into, playing her,” Linnea Berthelsen tells me. “But I think this morally grey area is so important because that’s what Kali is about. What is the right thing to do?”
When we unexpectedly meet Kali again in the final season of Stranger Things, she has been recaptured; imprisoned once more. On Berthelsen’s first day back on set, she filmed the scene that embodies Kali’s interior and exterior change:
“I knew they wanted the shaved look for the season, but that scene wasn’t in the script,” Berthelsen reveals. “I suggested that we shave my head on-screen. We wouldn’t even have to use it.”
They used it.
Photo above team credits: Photography - David Reiss, Styling - Aimee Croysdill, Makeup - Charlotte Yeomans, Hair - Kat Suhre
Stripped of her punk purple hair — the mark of her autonomy, of her defiance — Kali is reduced into what Berthelsen calls “the raw, inner child”. This lens of understanding led Berthelsen, in preparation to resume this role, to read several Holocaust survivor accounts, specifically from children.
“It was crucial to get the child’s perspective. In captivity, experimented on,” she explains. For Berthelsen, every polarising choice Kali makes is inseparable from the trauma of her formative years; she is shaped by that prolonged dehumanisation. Kali’s return to the show takes Stranger Thing’s exploration of scientific cruelty to new, horrific territory.
Image on this page and header image: Courtesy of Netflix
In an unforgettable scene, Kali runs through rooms upon rooms of corpse-like pregnant women, actively dying from experiments that use Kali’s own blood. It’s out of this context, alongside the show’s more supernatural plotlines, that Kali’s most polarising act emerges: urging Eleven (played by Millie Bobby Brown) to sacrifice herself to end the cycle of violence.
“Only the Duffer brothers truly know what happens,” Berthelsen notes, regarding Eleven’s ambiguous ending.
Kali doesn’t ask for forgiveness for her choices, and neither does Berthelsen on her behalf. In a world of violated bodily autonomy and state sanctioned violence, she asks only the question that haunts the show itself.
What is the right thing to do?
Photo above team credits: Photography - David Reiss, Styling - Aimee Croysdill, Makeup - Charlotte Yeomans, Hair - Kat Suhre