By India McCarty
For actress Linda Hamilton, “everything is a blessing right now.”
“I’ve found a great balance between work and life,” she told AARP. “I have found a way to weave it together very beautifully. I certainly feel like everything is a blessing right now.”
Hamilton is famous for her role in THE TERMINATOR and returns to her sci-fi roots with her latest project: Season 5 of STRANGER THINGS.
“When they invited me, I thought, Oh, they’re wrong. No, no, no, no. That’s a whole other world that I’m not in, but I love watching. There was a funny little disconnect for a minute,” the actress laughed. “And then I was like, ‘Yippee!’”
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Hamilton called her current work-life balance “such a surprise,” adding, “I haven’t worked that fiercely for a three-year period, doing two series at a time and slipping a movie in between. And yet I’m managing to still be part of my community and not leave all my friends behind because I’m working. I have found a way to weave it together very beautifully.”
In her new role in the Netflix hit “Stranger Things” and as a grandmother, Linda Hamilton is redefining work-life balance. She talks about both in a Q&A with AARP: 👉 https://t.co/w1gsnnfgok#Celebrities #StrangerThings pic.twitter.com/ywXWUPjjX9
— AARP Ohio (@AARPOhio) December 1, 2025
Surprisingly, Hamilton was close to retiring from acting before the Duffer Brothers called her about joining the final season of STRANGER THINGS.
“It’s funny, because I had called my agent maybe a month before [getting the role] and said, ‘Dude, I gotta retire,’” she told Variety.
She cited the frequent travel demands of being an actor, as well as “a really bad hip problem” as reasons for considering retirement.
“And of course, my agent was like, ‘Oh, you don’t mean that,’” Hamilton laughed. “Then he calls me, and he says ‘STRANGER THINGS called and asked if you were available. And I said yes.’ So I laughed at that, like, no one takes me seriously at all. He signed me up for a year.”
She spoke further on her current career resurgence in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, saying, “I haven’t worked this much since I started to talk about retirement. Now, I’m working all the time.”
“I actually love acting more than I ever have,” Hamilton continued. “It’s hard being a young actress, single mother, career woman to create the time to do the work, but also to give time to your children. So I find that I can luxuriate and just sit with a script for a day and get so fired up. I really get to sit and learn lines so that I go in off book and ready.”
Hamilton’s new work-life balance is paying off in a major way for the actress!
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