“He just got weirder and weirder”: the co-star Matthew Modine wanted to murder

Posted On November 7, 2025November 7, 2025

The world is about to get very Stranger Things dominated over the next month or so as the long-awaited fifth season drops on Netflix – or at least some of it – and the story of Hawkins, Indiana and the Upside Down comes to a close.

Of course, one man unlikely to play a major part in events is Matthew Modine, given he – spoiler alert – didn’t make it past the last season. 

But who knows, maybe there will be flashbacks, like there often are in the smash hit show that’s become a cultural landmark for Netflix and inspired countless other spooky retro hits. Modine starred in the show right from the very beginning as Dr Martin Brenner, head of the spooky research centre where all kinds of nosebleed-related wrongness was occurring. 

And it marked something of a comeback for Modine, who had been in movies since the early 1980s but hadn’t had what you might call a hit since a smaller role in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises in 2012.

Modine’s most successful era was, without doubt, the few years after he starred in the sex comedy Private School, one of the countless movies like Porky’s that functioned solely to see idiotic young men trying to look at college girls in the shower as though it was some kind of rite of passage.

That led to a role alongside Nicolas Cage in Alan Parker’s Birdy the following year, and then, after turning down a role in Top Gun due to his political beliefs, he appeared in a sports drama called Vision Quest instead, he caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick, who was casting for his Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket. 

It was 1987 and Kubrick was filming the movie in east London, with a cast that included Modine, Adam Baldwin and Vincent D’Onofrio, who played ‘Private Gomer Pyle’ and with whom Modine clashed almost from the very beginning, mostly due to his insistence on method acting and refusing to relax between takes. 

Modine told The Independent: “He just got weirder and weirder as he went into the world his character was entering into.”

Tensions were obvious between the pair during a marching sequence for Kubrick, when D’Onofrio got upset at Modine having fun once the camera stopped rolling. D’Onofrio told Modine that he should stop messing around, to which Modine, who is vehemently anti-method acting, replied: “What are you gonna do if I don’t stop joking around?”

Modine continued: “And Vince goes, ‘Well, I’m gonna kick your ass.’ I’m holding this M14 rifle that weighs about 30 pounds, and I just wanna crack it across his skull.

“All the extras were like (in a British accent] ‘Oooh, oooh, go on, Matty!’ That was the end of our friendship for the rest of the shoot. But it was good for the film.”

Modine was indeed a revelation as the wisecracking Marine, Private Davis, and received huge acclaim for his performance, and ironically, it was he who had recommended D’Onofrio for his role in the first place. 

The movie itself, meanwhile, was Oscar-nominated for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’. Modine made the most of his fame, continuing a long career that saw him make at least a movie a year, if not more, for the next 38 years. Aside from Stranger Things, Modine has another big TV series on the way in the form of Zero Day with Robert De Niro, which hits Netflix in February next year. He’ll also be in the mega monster movie Godzilla x Kong: Supernova in 2027 alongside Jack O’Connell.

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