Chase Stokes is moving on from the role that made him a breakout name, just as Outer Banks returned on Thursday for its fifth and final season. The 33-year-old said he is closing out the show with a clear sense of relief, even if the road to that ending was anything but smooth.
That ending matters because Outer Banks did not become a phenomenon in a normal way. Stokes said the cast was one of the first Netflix productions back on set during the pandemic, when they were taking three COVID tests a day, wearing masks and filming in freezing temperatures while pretending it was summer. They also could not go out because of restrictions and guidelines, so the production’s early success was wrapped inside a kind of isolation that made the rise harder to measure in real time.
Stokes said he is still thinking about how little the cast understood what was happening around them. “I had so much shit wrong,” he said, adding that he has always believed “it’s not how the plane takes off, it’s how you land it.” For him, that means the final season is not just a wrap-up for the show, but a chance to judge whether the cast handled the surge in attention as well as they could have.
The scale of that attention became impossible to ignore later. Stokes said that during season two filming in downtown Charleston, about 3,000 fans gathered to watch the cast work, and the Charleston Police Department had to step in with crowd control so filming could continue in locations the production was paying for. He said there were no neat lines between fame and work anymore. “It’s not like you have one or two paparazzi who are just there; you have hundreds of people across the way that are screaming while you’re in the middle of a take,” he said.
That shift hit him again after pandemic restrictions eased. Stokes said he had a really hard time adjusting to fame once the world opened back up, and that the attention could feel surreal even in ordinary moments. He recalled a TMZ tour bus stopping beside him while he was walking his dog in L.A., a scene that made the outside life around the show feel as unreal as the one on camera.
What happens next for Stokes is still the open question. He is leaving behind the role that defined his rise, but he has not said what he will do after Outer Banks ends. For now, the final season gives him a public landing, and by his own standard, that is the part that decides how the story is remembered.
