Natalia Dyer’s New Normal

Natalia Dyer loves a good baseball hat. Today’s is dark green, with a logo that says The Crux Motel — a piece of merch from friend and castmate Joe Keery’s band DJO, and a helpful bit of disguise. Along with a pair of sunglasses, and a baggy leather jacket, she blends right in with the East Village crowd gathering this afternoon outside of the always bumping Thai spot Soothr. Until we get inside, and Dyer unravels her early fall layers and lets her lighter-than-usual blond hair free. “I hear you’re on Netflix?” a sweet manager, clearly informed by a younger staff member, says approaching our table as we dig into our respective bowls of curry. A few beats later, a complimentary plate of sticky mango rice arrives.

Dyer thanks her effusively before taking a bite. She’s usually able to get around New York without much commotion, but moments like this do happen. “I imagine when the show comes back it will pick back up, when it’s top of mind,” she says. “I do recognize that is probably weird. There was one time we were in the middle of nowhere in Georgia at a gas station, and a guy came up to me like, ‘I was just watching you on TV!’ That has to be weird for him! But you get very fond of baseball caps.”

“The show” is, of course, Stranger Things, the Netflix behemoth on which she’s spent the last 10 years playing Nancy Wheeler, the determined aspiring journalist squaring off against the supernatural with her younger brother (Finn Wolfard) and his geeky friends. Dyer herself was considering a career in journalism when she moved to New York in 2013 at 18 to attend New York University; within a few months, she had relocated to Atlanta to film the first season of the show. She still lives in New York, but pretty much everything else has changed. In December 2024, the show wrapped its fifth and final season; a few weeks later, she turned 30. And as she gears up for the final, final goodbye with her last round of press as Nancy, she’s only now able to parse the journey and where it’s shot her back out: “This year has been a real coming back to my own life.”

It’s certainly a banger way to kick off a new decade. But Dyer is happy to have spent her early adult years in the fictional world of Hawkins, Indiana. “It’s a very particular experience of your 20s — and not one that I would change, because it was wonderful, but that’s all of your 20s in this space and being part of this thing. It was a really wild, magical vibe. And it does go by quick.” With this last season, “I thought, ‘I just want to be present. I just want to remember. I just want to really be here, sit in it, and be with these people, be on set and try to just take it in.’”

Besides giving her the role of a lifetime, the show introduced her to her long-term boyfriend — she’s been with co-star Charlie Heaton since 2016 — as well as lifelong bonds with the cast; the younger actors, like Wolfhard and Millie Bobby Brown, are now around the same age she was when she first started filming. “They’ll always be little kids in my eyes, but they’ve grown up into really smart, well-adjusted adults… I feel so proud of all of them.”

It’s now been more than three years since Season 4 debuted, breaking the record for the most consecutive days on Netflix’s Top 10 list (a record it still holds). This upcoming season is expected to blow past that: The first four episodes, about two hours long each, drop on Thanksgiving; another three drop on Christmas Day, followed by the series finale on New Year’s Eve (with a theatrical release for that one, as well). “This definitely felt huge,” Dyer says of filming the final season. “You’re just part of something that’s really, really beyond what you could imagine.”

Dyer is “really proud” of what she’s seen so far, though sometimes the show's heavy special effects made it hard to understand what, exactly, she was filming: “In those moments where you’re like ‘I don’t truly have a sense of how it’s going to play or feel,’ they really tried to give us a sense for what it’s going to look like,” she says. “Which is actually really helpful because a lot of times you’re looking at tennis balls, and they’re like, ‘It’s a monster,’ and you’re like, ‘OK, I’ll guess what this one is!’”

Still, you could hardly ask for a better acting education than the entirety of Stranger Things. “The first few seasons were just like, ‘Oh, my God. Wow. How did I get here?’ You just feel just happy to be there,” says Dyer (whose very first film credit was the Hannah Montana movie in 2009). “Being on the show for a certain amount of time, you feel like you have a bit more ownership and camaraderie and confidence walking on the set.”

Her castmates have been quickly carving out life after Hawkins: Keery and Maya Hawke both have successful music careers; Wolfhard released a solo album of his own this summer and is a burgeoning director; Sadie Sink had a Tony-nominated run on Broadway. But Dyer — who spent her offseasons filming projects like the acclaimed indie Yes, God, Yes — is taking her time to figure out what’s next. “I’m starting a new phase, and I’ve just been hanging out with friends and family and traveling and those things,” she says. “Just having that autonomy back and [being able] to just sit a little bit and think about what I want.”

Right now, that list includes such small pleasures as hot yoga — she’s headed there to meet a friend after we finish our sticky rice — or her weekly in-person French class, which is slowly but surely reviving her high-school memories of the language. “If you have a drink or two first, it sounds better coming out because I’m just not thinking about it as much,” she jokes. “But the ultimate goal is to go to Paris and confidently speak French.”

She slips her cap back on, ready to disappear back out into the fading afternoon. “It’s been a really exploratory, grounded and ungrounded kind of a year, if that makes any sense,” she says before we say goodbye. “Every woman I’ve ever talked to speaks so highly of the 30s and just how you feel in yourself and how you feel in relationships. I was excited for my 30s generally, but I don’t know if you understand until you’re in it. I’m just barely in it, and I’m like ‘Wow.’”

Top image credit: Valentino clothing, Selim Mouzannar earrings