Home » Latest » Trending Now » Natalia Dyer Talks “Stranger Things” & Its Third Season

Natalia Dyer Talks “Stranger Things” & Its Third Season

8

InfoSearched 54 0 Trending Now

7.8

SaveSavedRemoved 2

Natalia Dyer stopped by BUILD Series to talk Nancy Wheeler’s biggest season yet.

Nancy Wheeler spent two seasons getting talked over, doubted, and underestimated by pretty much everyone in Hawkins. In the summer of 1985, she gets a byline instead. Natalia Dyer sat down for an in-studio interview with BUILD Series on July 15, 2019, to walk through Season 3 of Netflix’s “Stranger Things,” which had premiered globally just eleven days earlier on July 4.

• Dyer detailed Nancy’s summer internship at The Hawkins Post, where she confronts workplace sexism while investigating strange occurrences around town alongside Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton).
• Season 3 is set during the summer of 1985 in Hawkins, Indiana, with the Hawkins crew navigating a new mall and the early stirrings of adulthood.
• Dyer credited creators Matt and Ross Duffer for raising the stakes with bigger, more action-driven spectacle while still protecting the character-driven relationships that built the show’s fanbase.

Nancy Wheeler’s Newsroom Assignment

Dyer has played Nancy since the show’s 2016 debut, and the character’s arc in Season 3 marks her most concrete step toward adulthood yet. Instead of chasing monsters as a bystander, Nancy lands a summer gig at The Hawkins Post, the local paper, where she’s stuck fetching coffee and getting dismissed by the newsroom’s older male staffers before she and Jonathan start pulling on a thread of strange occurrences that nobody else at the paper wants to touch.

Dyer walked BUILD’s studio audience through how that internship storyline doubles as Nancy’s reckoning with the kind of casual sexism that keeps her stuck at the bottom of the newsroom pecking order, even as she and Jonathan end up chasing the season’s biggest story right under their editor’s nose.

Nancy Wheeler, high school senior, now doubles as a Hawkins Post cub reporter chasing down the town’s next monster story.

The Duffer Brothers’ Balancing Act

Dyer used the BUILD sit-down to praise Matt and Ross Duffer directly for how they scaled the show up without losing the character work that made it click in the first place. Season 3 leans harder into set-piece spectacle around Hawkins’ brand-new mall and the town’s latest threat, but Dyer’s read was that the writers kept the group’s friendships and romantic tangles front and center rather than letting the action swallow them.

That’s the same tightrope a lot of studio interview circuits end up picking apart with rising stars — shows like Funniest Interview Ever as actors go off the rails capture how loose these actor Q&As can get once the cast starts riffing on set stories. Dyer’s appearance stayed more measured, but the audience questions pushed her into similar territory, asking about what it’s actually like being handed more material season over season.

From Suburban Sophomore to Investigator

The live session wrapped with Dyer fielding questions straight from the studio crowd — about working on a genuine global phenomenon, about growing up on camera alongside the rest of the Hawkins cast since she was a teenager herself, and about Nancy’s own transformation from a suburban high schooler in Season 1 to someone willing to argue her way into a real investigation by Season 3.

Dyer’s framing throughout was that Nancy’s progression mirrors a wider shift in the show’s third season, where Netflix’s slate that summer leaned on “Stranger Things” as its marquee returning title. For a broader sense of what else Netflix was pushing around that stretch, The Best New Things To Watch On Netflix In July 2020 shows how much real estate the platform kept clearing for its biggest original series.

Nancy’s newsroom fight, according to Dyer, isn’t a side plot — it’s the clearest evidence the show gives that these characters are aging into adults with actual stakes, not just kids running from the Upside Down anymore.