Keery's trick is to be introduced as the boy you are meant to dislike and then, without changing his delivery, become the one you are watching for. Across five seasons of Stranger Things it worked; on Fargo he plays a boy who is never allowed the turn.
Fi1m perspective
Steve Harrington arrives in Stranger Things (2016) as the boy with the hair and the car, the one the story has plainly set up to be got rid of. Keery does not play against it. He plays it straight and quiet, and somewhere across the first run something shifts that neither the writing nor the performance stops to announce. By the later seasons he was the person we most looked forward to seeing. We would not have bet on that in the first episode, and the reason is the delivery: Keery never raises his voice to tell us Steve has changed, so when Steve turns out to be looking after people, we believe him.
He came to the part in late 2015 from DePaul's theatre school and a few small television jobs, Chicago Fire and Empire among them, as a recurring player, and was made a regular from the second season. The programme ran until 2025 and he was in all of it, under Matt and Ross Duffer. Around it he built a film career on the smaller side: the lead in Spree (2020), a dark satire in which his Kurt Kunkle is a man nobody is meant to like; Keys in Free Guy (2021); Marmalade (2024). We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here. He also records and tours as Djo, and a track from his second album, Decide (2022), became a hit; early on he had kept the two names deliberately apart.
The part that tests him is Gator Tillman in the fifth run of Noah Hawley's Fargo (2023). Gator is the sheriff's son and deputy and useless at both, and Keery gives him the same unforced quiet he gave Steve, which is what makes it uncomfortable: this is the boy with the car if nobody had ever needed him. We spent the season wanting Gator caught and were surprised, more than once, to feel sorry for him. He is not the season's frightening man; that is Sam Spruell's Ole Munch, and Juno Temple and Jennifer Jason Leigh do the heavy work around him. Gator's job is to be small in a story full of people who are not, and Keery does it without once asking for our sympathy.
What critics notice, and we do too, is how little he does: a low-key, naturalistic delivery that fits an ensemble and can carry a lead. The nearest thing to a criticism anyone raises is Steve himself, who tends to get through the door before Keery does. He has said of the casting that he "just met the character that they were looking for at the right time in my life," which is modest and probably true. Steve is finished now. On the evidence of Gator we would like to see him cast as somebody nobody is rooting for, and left there.
Biography
Joe Keery is an American actor and musician. He trained at The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago, graduating with a BFA in acting in 2014.
Keery is best known for playing Steve Harrington in the Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–2025). He has also appeared in films including Spree (2020) and Free Guy (2021), and as Gator Tillman in the fifth season of Fargo (2023–2024).
As a musician, performing under the name Djo, Keery was a founding member of the psychedelic rock band Post Animal before pursuing solo work. He released albums including Twenty Twenty (2019), Decide (2022) and The Crux (2025).
