Meet Jake Connelly, who plays bully-turned-ally Derek Turnbow in Netflix’s Stranger Things

Nearly 10 years since it premiered, Netflix’s sci-fi juggernaut Stranger Things aired its grand finale on New Year’s Eve, closing out 2025 with an emotional farewell to the fictional small town of Hawkins, Indiana.\nWhile fans were sad to say goodbye to the show’s actors – Millie Bobby Brown, Finn Wolfhard, Noah Schnapp, Natalia Dyer, Sadie Sink, Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin – the final season also introduced new main characters like Holly Wheeler (Nell Fisher) and Derek Turnbow, played by Jake Connelly, who quickly won fans over.\n\nInitially introduced as a foul-mouthed bully, Derek wins over the Hawkins teenagers when he becomes an unlikely hero after being kidnapped by the series’ ultimate antagonist, Vecna.\nHere’s what to know about Connelly, who at just 13 years old, already has 1.5 million Instagram followers.\nHe fell in love with acting doing commercials\n\nBorn in 2012, Jake Connelly hails from Chicago, Illinois. He began his acting career a couple of years ago when his mum’s director friend tapped the youngster for a window commercial.\n“I fell in love with it. We got some headshots from my cousin, and one thing led to another,” Connelly told Teen Vogue. “We got signed on with a talent agency and we got all these auditions, and one of them was Stranger Things.”\n\nWhile Connelly was ecstatic about auditioning for Stranger Things, the young actor admits he was expecting to be cast as a minor character at best.\n“It was just amazing, seeing how much of a main player Derek could become, and how much of a different person,” he told Teen Vogue.\nHe kept his role a secret for a year and a half\n\nDuring his appearance last month on The Tonight Show, Connelly revealed to Jimmy Fallon that he had to hide the fact that he would be in Stranger Things from his family and friends for over a year and a half, and instead told them he was filming a “mayonnaise documentary”.\n“‘Mayonnaise documentary’ is a really good dead-end point if you’re asking too many questions,” Connelly told Teen Vogue.\nHe never thought he’d make it this big\n\nIn his interview with Teen Vogue, Connelly talked about how it felt to walk down a red carpet for the first time.\n“This is the stuff of a dream for me, walking the red carpet at the [TCL] Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. I never thought I’d be able to have that level of classic Hollywood. It feels like something straight out of the cartoons.”\n