Stranger Things fans will need no introduction to Natalia Dyer, whose role as high school student Nancy Wheeler has been called the “unsung feminist heroine” of the show. Now, the 25-year-old actress is taking on a new challenge in director Karen Maine’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy Yes, God, Yes, in which Dyer plays Alice, a sexually curious teenager struggling to repress the urges that are forbidden at her strict Catholic high school. (The technology of the early aughts plays a major role, from AOL chat rooms to a vibrating Nokia phone.) Last week, Vogue caught up with Dyer via phone to talk about Yes, God, Yes, the challenges of quarantine, and the importance of slowing down.
First of all, where are you based right now?
I’m in Atlanta, Georgia, where we shoot Stranger Things, but obviously, shooting is on hold. I’m quite fond of it!
What has quarantine been like for you?
Very day-by-day! I’d be on a roll, being like, “This is different!” then I’d experience really low lows, then highs, then lows...just a lot of ups and downs. It’s really been a period of reassessing life and slowing down from my normal pace.
Are you distracting yourself with any particular hobbies?
Board games, watching TV...I’m watching *I May Destroy You*, which is absolutely amazing. I have to keep reminding myself that it’s okay to not be doing something all the time.
What drew you to the role of Alice in Yes, God, Yes?
Karen just wrote such a funny, well-written part. I play a lot of teenage, coming-of-age roles, and Alice is really unlike any other character I’ve seen, or read, or worked on.
Alice does a lot of exploration around religion in this film, which really resonated with me as a viewer. Was that the case for you as well?
Well, I grew up in the South, where a lot of people learned about religion in school. The movie is autobiographical, so a majority of what Alice goes through actually happened to Karen, and we had a lot of good chats. So much of the film is in the writing, and Karen was really open and honest and had a great outlook on everything that we were doing. Karen went to a camp similar to the one portrayed in the movie, and she showed me a lot of resources from that time, even letters she wrote home: She was really generous about telling her story and showing me how to portray it.
Do you have other coming-of-age stories you turned to for inspiration while embodying Alice?
I honestly don’t remember a lot of stories about girls coming of age that I watched or related to in my childhood. There are definitely more out there now, but every coming-of-age story is a little different. I know Yes, God, Yes is not going to be everyone’s film, but I hope it opens up some conversations and make people think differently about themselves, or women in general.