Brett Gelman, Who Plays Murray Bauman on “Stranger Things,” Spent Months Preparing For His Role By Learning Karate.
In Netflix's Stranger Things, actor Brett Gelman discusses how he prepared for the part of Murray Bauman. Bauman is a former investigative journalist promoted to a main character in the fourth season after being introduced in the second series and working with Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) to take down the show's bad guys.
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After learning that the character was a black belt in karate, Gelman said he began training to play Bauman after the show's creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, informed him about it.
“They wanted me to really learn it, so we could visually justify or sell that I was a black belt because that's not just doing some karate moves,” Gelman said. “They needed to be black belt moves. We wanted funny, but not Beverly Hills Ninja-type of funny.”
Before filming, Gelman said he “trained for three months, four days a week with these amazing masters, Simon and Phillip Rhee.”
While the actor claimed to be “very much in the beginning” of his karate training, he promised to “stick with it” and develop to the next degree.
Also fluent in Russian, the character of Bauman is also a master of karate and serves as a translator for Joyce and a Russian scientist. Gelman stated that he had an interpreter, Elena Baranova, to assist him in learning Russian for the scene.
“I worked just as hard at that with her as I did with Simon and Phillip on the martial arts,” he said.
Brett Gelman is playing Murray Bauman in Netflix's Stranger Things 4, which is now streaming.
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