This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Oxford Emory chapter.
I was a little late in the game and only finished Stranger Things 2 this week, and I was just as entranced with the second season as the first. After the last episode, I was ranting and raving to anyone and everyone who was awake (it was sometime after 2 A.M.). I got into a conversation about how good-looking some of the characters were even with their ridiculous eighties styles. When I said how much I loved seeing Zac Efron with a mullet, my friend put an end to my Zac Efron fangirl moment by informing me that he doesn’t actually play Billy.
I was so sure during my nine-hour binge-watching session that I had just watched Zac Efron prance around Hawkins with a glorious mullet, denim jacket, and a single drop-earring but I was wrong. Billy was actually played by an Australian actor named Dacre Montgomery! I took to the internet right away, knowing Google held all the answers to my questions because Dacre Montgomery quite honestly could be Zac Efron’s Doppelganger.
After typing “Zac Efron Stranger Things 2” into the search bar, I was relieved to see so many people on the internet had made the same mistake as I had. As I scrolled through the top hits, the most intriguing headline read: “Stranger Things Fan Theory Posits Zac Efron’s Dad May Be Billy.” Clicking on the link, I would read one of the best fan theories I could have hoped to find.
The theory basically plays on the fact that Zac Efron and Dacre Montgomery look almost exactly alike. Since Billy was about seventeen when he appears in Season 2, set in 1984, it would make sense that he could have had a son in 1987 which is the year that Zac Efron was born! Aside from that, Billy is from California, and so is Zac! Now we know that fan theories are rarely true, but this one was amusing nonetheless!
If you want to read the full fan theory, you can read it here.