Natalia Dyer
Natalia Dyer is an actor, born 1995.
Dyer's first credit is a bit part in Hannah Montana: The Movie, followed by small independent films nobody saw, The Greening of Whitney Brown and I Believe in Unicorns. Then Stranger Things arrived in 2016 and she spent the next nine years as Nancy Wheeler, from the older sister at the edge of the frame to the character the show most often points at the danger.
The performance is built on impatience. Nancy is written as the responsible one, and Dyer plays that as a permanent state of low-grade irritation with everyone slower than her, which is a much more interesting choice than earnestness and the reason the character kept surviving rewrites. It also gives her a specific physical vocabulary: a set jaw, a very fast walk, an unwillingness to let a sentence finish if she already knows where it is going.
The smart part of the career is what she did between seasons. Yes, God, Yes exists twice on her record, first as a short and then as the feature built out of it, both as Alice, and the feature is the best acting she has on film, a comedy that works only because she plays confusion and guilt completely straight, without a single wink to the audience. Around it sit Coco in Velvet Buzzsaw, Willis in Things Heard and Seen, the horror film All Fun and Games, and Chloe Lake in Based on a True Story. It is a deliberate CV of small films rather than the franchise offers a Stranger Things lead could have taken.
Movies (9)
TV (4)
Where to start with Natalia Dyer
Start with Yes, God, Yes. It is the film that shows what she can do when nobody is chasing her with a monster: a whole comedy resting on one performer's ability to play confusion without making it cute. The 2017 short Yes, God, Yes is the same story in miniature and worth twenty minutes for the comparison.
Stranger Things is obviously the main event, and Nancy is the character whose arc holds up best across the whole run. Velvet Buzzsaw is a satire that does not entirely work, and she is one of the parts that does. Based on a True Story is the closest she has come to comedy on television, and it is spikier than expected. All Fun and Games is for horror completists. Things Heard & Seen is beautifully shot and hard to defend otherwise.