Chase Stokes‘ time of playing John B is also up.

Last week, Stokes took to Instagram to share that filming wrapped on the fifth and final season of Netflix’s Outer Banks. And in a new interview with People, the actor opens up about how he’s grateful for the show, but at the same, he and his cast members are ready for it to end.

“We want the story to end on the right note versus [turning] four seasons into season nine and we’re going after aliens or something,” Stokes said. “We want to cut the cord before we lose the plot.”

The YA show, which first premiered in 2020, follows a group of teens in North Carolina’s Outer Banks who end up treasure hunting. Madelyn Cline, Drew Starkey, Jonathan Daviss, Madison Bailey and Carlacia Grant also star in the series and Stokes said they have become a “true family.”

“There’s just so much gratitude because I was a kid who had a dream and no access to an industry, never really even knew what the process was,” Stokes continued. “I’ve checked so many boxes that I thought it would span the course of the next 40 years of my career.”

He also explained what he hopes is next in his career. “I always reference Robert Pattinson after he finished Twilight and [the] Harry Potter [franchise] and how he took creative risks, but really challenged himself as an artist. That’s the blueprint for me. I want to show people that the floppy-haired beach boy from the Netflix young adult show, is now 33 years old,” he said. All I want to do is challenge myself.”

When it comes to the series finale, Stokes teased, “It’s beautiful to know that even though there’s the highs and lows throughout all of the seasons, it’s ending exactly how I was told when I started the show,” he said.

The season four finale saw the shocking death of JJ (played by Rudy Pankow). Showrunner Jonas Pate previously told The Hollywood Reporter that the storyline was planned at the end of season three and explained why they killed him off. “It’s been kind of lurking in his DNA from the beginning. He’s really a tragic figure, and the idea of mortality, and you only have a finite window — it’s also a theme of the show. It’s something John B has talked about from the first season,” Pate said. “So believe it or not, this is something that was always sort of baked in the cake, and we just wanted to tell the story as elegantly and interestingly as possible.”

*Outer Banks *season five drops on the streamer next year.