Every long-running series has those blink-and-you'll-miss-them characters—faces that slip past unnoticed until one of them suddenly becomes a Netflix poster child. Stranger Things has plenty. Remember season 2's high-school party girl Tina? Most don't. Yet that was Madelyn Cline, years before Outer Banks catapulted her to the pop-culture center. Funny how Hawkins High had its own sleeper star.
Tina wasn't written to shift the tectonic plates of Hawkins lore. She shows up twice. Hosts a Halloween party. Dances in Madonna drag. Still—small roles can echo. That party, chaotic and neon-lit, is where Nancy (Natalia Dyer), still drowning in guilt over Barb, gets drunk and detonates her relationship with Steve (Joe Keery). A subplot disguised as background noise, sparked by a character we barely clocked. Gorgeous. Grating. Gorgeous again.
Cline has since carved out a career that dwarfs her Stranger Things cameo. Outer Banks turned her into Gen Z's beach-noir idol, and in 2025 she faced off against a hook-wielding killer in the I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot. Contrast that with Tina—the high-schooler whose biggest worry was whether Billy Hargrove (Dacre Montgomery) noticed her. It's almost comical, how time reframes things.
And now? The Hawkins clock is ticking. Stranger Things returns for its fifth and final season in two waves—Part 1 on November 26, 2025, Part 2 on December 25, and the finale on December 31. Whether Tina resurfaces or not is beside the point. She's part of the show's texture, the web of small-town kids swept into a saga too big for them. And honestly, it might be more haunting if she never comes back—her story frozen at that one teenage party, untouched by Vecna's apocalypse.
Anyway. That's the strange beauty of background roles: they remind us that Hawkins wasn't just Eleven and Demogorgons—it was also the kids whose names we barely remembered. And one of them, improbably, became Madelyn Cline.
What to Remember About Madelyn Cline's Stranger Things Role
A forgotten cameo
Cline played Tina, a Hawkins High teen, across two season 2 episodes.
The party that mattered
Her Halloween bash set up Nancy's breakup with Steve—altering the series' teen dynamic.
Before the spotlight
Years later, Cline would headline Outer Banks and horror franchises, eclipsing her Hawkins stint.
Season 5 countdown
The final season arrives in three drops: Nov. 26, Dec. 25, and Dec. 31, 2025.
Small roles, lasting echoes
Even throwaway characters can quietly steer the emotional current of a story.
