While we all know and love Natalia Dyer as protective big sister Nancy on Stranger Things, but now she is taking her role into the real world.
Speaking to The Independent, the 25-year-old actress shared her thoughts on how the media continues to oversexualise her younger co-stars on the show, Millie Bobby Brown, Gavin Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Noah Schnapp, and Finn Wolfhard. She went on to admit that she feels incredibly protective of them all.
“There are so many layers going on here. I generally feel like, to me, it’s oversexualising them. I feel protective over the younger kids even though they’re not kids anymore, they’re teens,” she shared.
She added, “They’re all great people and all having to grow up in very crazy circumstances. As a private person, I just feel like, leave people alone—unless you’re talking about their work or what they want to talk about.”
“It’s a very tricky and complex issue,” Dyer admits. “[It's a] cultural issue, there must be a bigger concept behind it as to why. Just let people be the people that they are, without any judgement.”
Millie Bobby Brown, who stars as Eleven, has previously opened up about the discussion of inappropriate sexualisation of the show’s young cast.
Taking to Instagram, Brown said: “There are moments I get frustrated from the inaccuracy, inappropriate comments, sexualisation, and unnecessary insults that ultimately have resulted in pain and insecurity for me.”
In Dyer's interview, she also elaborated on the draining feeling behind fame taking away her anonymity.
“It’s lovely to meet fans, but it’s very like, ‘Oh my gosh, I just want to go to the grocery store and get some milk. I don’t want to take a photo everywhere I go,’” she said.
“At first, it was jarring. There are fans everywhere. It’s a difficult thing to navigate. It’s been like five years since we started Stranger Things, and I’ve become more confident in how I handle situations. At first, I had quite a few bouts of anxiety just as the show was coming out because there’s this mentality of letting people down and not giving enough.”
However, Dyer isn’t the only Hawkins resident to feel protective over their co-stars. In 2017, Shannon Purser defended Finn Wolfhard’s right to be a child after a fan slammed him for not stopping to speak with them.
"I'm an adult,” she wrote at the time. “I can't imagine being inundated with all this attention at his age. It's intimidating.”
