Let me get this out of the way first: Alfred Molina is the reason this show works. The Duffer Brothers could have cast a dozen capable veteran actors as Sam Cooper, the recently widowed former engineer who shuffles into The Boroughs with a suitcase and a haunted look. They picked Molina, and within about fifteen minutes of the pilot I understood why.
Sam is the audience surrogate, which is a thankless job in a mystery box show. He's the guy who has to ask the dumb questions, walk down the suspicious hallway, and stare meaningfully at the strange thing in the courtyard. In lesser hands that role becomes a chore. Molina turns it into a character study.
What I love about his performance:
- The grief is load-bearing. Sam isn't investigating The Boroughs because he's curious. He's investigating because if he stops moving, he'll drown. Molina plays every scene with the quiet weight of a man who lost his wife eight months ago and hasn't slept properly since.
- The engineer's brain never turns off. When something doesn't add up — a pipe that shouldn't be there, a power draw that doesn't match the building — Sam notices. Molina sells the small recalibrations behind his eyes.
- He's not a hero. He's a tired sixty-something man who would rather be left alone. The show keeps refusing to let him be left alone, and watching him reluctantly engage is the central pleasure of Season 1.
By the time Sam pieces together what Anneliese has been doing in the basement levels, the show has earned every beat of his horror. Molina doesn't play it big. He plays it like a man finally seeing the shape of a problem he's suspected from day one. That restraint is what makes the finale land.
Judy: Geena Davis Refuses to Be the Love Interest
Geena Davis hasn't had a part this good in a decade, and she clearly knows it. Judy is the resident Sam meets on his second day — sharp, funny, a little flirtatious, and obviously hiding something. Every show in this genre has a version of this character. Most of them are wasted.
Judy is not wasted. Davis plays her as a woman who has been at The Boroughs long enough to know exactly what kind of place it is, and who has made her peace with that knowledge in ways the show takes seven episodes to fully reveal.
The things Davis nails:
- The flirtation is real, but it's also a tool. Judy likes Sam. She also needs Sam to keep poking at things she can't poke at herself without consequences. Davis plays both notes at the same time without ever making Judy feel calculating.
- She has history with everyone. The way Judy's shoulders shift when Anneliese enters a room tells you more than any flashback. Davis does a lot of acting with her spine.
- The Art reveal recontextualizes her. Once we learn that Clarke Peters' Art is her estranged husband and has been here longer than she has, every earlier Judy scene plays differently on rewatch.
What I appreciate most is that the show refuses to flatten Judy into a romance plot. She and Sam have real chemistry, but Judy's arc is about her relationship with herself — what she's tolerated, what she's participated in, what she's ready to stop pretending about. By the finale, she's the one making the hardest choice in the show, and Davis plays it with the kind of clear-eyed exhaustion you can't fake.
Anneliese: Alfre Woodard Is Having the Time of Her Life
Alfre Woodard as the villain of a Duffer Brothers sci-fi show is the kind of casting that makes me trust a project sight unseen. Anneliese is the community matriarch of The Boroughs — the woman who greets new residents, runs the social calendar, knows everyone's medication schedule, and is, it turns out, the architect of the entire nightmare.
What's remarkable about Woodard's performance is how long she keeps Anneliese sympathetic. For the first three episodes, she's warm. Genuinely warm. The kind of neighbor you'd be grateful to have.
Then the show starts peeling back layers:
- Episode 4 — the conversation with Wally in the greenhouse, where Anneliese's smile doesn't reach her eyes for the first time.
- Episode 6 — the monologue about what she lost before she came here, which reframes her as a true believer rather than a monster.
- Episode 8 — the basement confrontation with Sam, where Woodard lets the warmth and the menace exist in the same sentence.
What makes Anneliese a great antagonist is that she's not wrong about everything. Her pitch — that the residents of The Boroughs have been given something the rest of the world would kill for — has real weight, and Woodard delivers it with the conviction of someone who has talked herself into it over decades. The horror isn't that she's evil. The horror is that she's persuasive.
The Supporting Men: Wally, Art, and Blaine
The Duffer Brothers know how to populate a world, and the men orbiting Sam, Judy, and Anneliese each carry a distinct piece of the show's tonal puzzle.
Denis O'Hare as Wally is the comic relief that isn't actually comic relief. Wally is the sardonic neighbor who shows up to deliver a one-liner and ends up delivering exposition you didn't realize you needed. O'Hare has been doing this kind of work for years, and he's a master at it.
Clarke Peters as Art is the slow-burn reveal of the season. For the first half, Art is barely a presence — a quiet man in the background of Judy's scenes, glimpsed in dining halls and never quite engaged. Then the show tells us he's her estranged husband, and Peters gets to unpack decades of resentment, grief, and complicity. The scene in episode 7 where he finally talks to Judy about what he's known and when he knew it is the single best two-hander of the season.
Seth Numrich as Blaine Shaw is the show's wild card. Blaine is the CEO of the company that built The Boroughs, presented to us as a polished tech executive in his thirties — and then revealed to be considerably older than that. Numrich plays Blaine with an uncanny stillness that reads as charisma on first watch and as something else entirely on second.
Mother and the Sons: Bill Pullman and the Shape of the Mystery
Here is where I have to be careful, because Bill Pullman's role in Season 1 is barely a role at all — and that's clearly the point.
Pullman is credited and present, but his character functions more as a background presence than a participant. He's the figure glimpsed at the edge of frame, the silhouette in the window of the building Sam isn't supposed to enter, the voice on a recording that no one quite explains. The show is using him the way the Duffer Brothers used certain ghostly figures in Stranger Things — as a promise that something larger is happening, and we're going to have to wait for it.
What I think the show is doing with him:
- The Boroughs is not a closed system. Anneliese is running this particular community, but she answers to something — or someone — older and more remote.
- The mythology is being parceled out deliberately. Season 1 is about Sam understanding the building. Season 2 is clearly about Sam understanding what the building is *for*.
- Casting Pullman this way is a flex. You don't hire Bill Pullman to be a face in a window unless you have plans for him.
What Each Character's Journey Says About the Show's Themes
Step back from the mystery box and The Boroughs is a show about what people will tolerate to feel safe. Every major character is a different answer to that question.
- Sam is the answer "nothing, once I see it clearly." He arrives broken and reluctant, and his arc is about choosing to act anyway.
- Judy is the answer "more than I'm proud of, for longer than I want to admit." Davis plays her as a woman who has been negotiating with her own conscience for years.
- Anneliese is the answer "everything, because the alternative is unbearable." Woodard makes her a true believer, which is scarier than making her a monster.
- Wally is the answer "I'll laugh about it."
- Art is the answer "I'll keep my head down and lose my marriage."
- Blaine is the answer "I built the thing, so the rules don't apply to me."
That's what makes the ensemble work. Each performance is locked into a thematic register, and the Duffer Brothers cast actors capable of holding those registers without ever feeling like symbols. The Boroughs has a great mystery, but it has a better cast. By the end of Season 1, I cared more about who these people were becoming than about what was in the basement. That's how you know the show is working.