‘Stranger Things 5’: Natalia Dyer on Nancy’s ‘Failure’ in Season 5 Premiere, Fans’ Obsession With Jonathan vs. Steve

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 5, Volume 1 of “Stranger Things.”

The ever-calculating, always-planning, consistently confident Vecna Crawl team leader Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer) made a mistake in the fifth and final season premiere of “Stranger Things”: not telling her parents and little sister that monsters were real.

Now, that error might cost Nancy and Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) mom Karen (Cara Buono), dad Ted (Joe Chrest) and little sister Holly (Nell Fisher) their lives, as Vecna has unleashed the Upside Down on the entire Wheeler family in order to get to Holly and use her in his overall plan for world domination.

In a place as twisted as Hawkins, where giant rifts into the Upside Down opened up in the ground at the end of Season 4, what was the reasoning Nancy and Mike used for not informing the other Wheelers about the threat of Vecna?

Natalia Dyer

COURTESY OF NETFLIX © 2025

“This actually was a conversation with the Duffers,” Dyer told Variety. “In that discovery of what’s happened since, what have we said to people? What have we explained? You have this military presence all around, and I think there’s this sense of — especially within Nancy — there’s this wanting to protect. I think in this scenario, especially like with her family, sometimes you feel like not telling is protecting.”

That turned out not to be the case, and now Karen and Ted are in the hospital in critical condition — and Holly has been taken by Vecna.

“With the whole situation now, there is a lot of guilt,” Dyer said. “She’s obviously lost people in her life before in this, and I think it does feel to her like a failure. It’s really, really hard. You’re trying to do what you think is the right thing in that moment, and things still don’t work. But I think that’s also a bonding moment for the Wheelers. I think it’s a galvanizing moment for what they have to do ahead of them. It was a really impactful way for Nancy, I think, to start the seaso — to have that moment of like, you think you have it together, and then you do not have it together. You do not have a handle on the situation.”

Natalia Dyer

Courtesy of Netflix

Amid the war with Vecna and the imminent danger to her family, Nancy is dealing with a much less serious dilemma, but one of great importance to “Stranger Things” fans: Her relationship with boyfriend Jonathan Byers (Charlie Heaton) and if she will ultimately end up with him, or old flame Steve Harrington (Joe Keery).

“This is a pressure-cooker situation,” Dyer said of Nancy and Jonathan’s lack of intimacy and romance in the first few episodes of Season 5. “Obviously, in the last season, they were apart for a long time, and then when they come back to each other — I mean, there’s so much pressure and stress. It gets put in perspective, I think: what matters, what you care about, where you can spend your energy, what demands it of you. And I think in a situation where you’ve been faced with death, with monsters, with these elements, there’s growing.

“She’s definitely in a place where she’s running on a survival level, but still figuring herself out and figuring her life out, and even what a life looks and will there be a life?” Dyer said. “There’s definitely friction going on, but I think her focus right now is fighting Vecna, running these crawls, doing that planning work.”

Ultimately, does Dyer care whether Nancy — if she makes it to the end of “Stranger Things” — ends up with Jonathan, Steve, someone else, or no one? She does.

“Nancy’s future does matter to me,” Dyer said. “After 10 years, you can’t help but really feel invested in these characters and their story. You want them to end up in a way that feels right. Not just the idealistic, most perfect, beautiful version — but when you’ve lived through this, you want them to come out with something that feels earned or deserved or that makes sense.

“And I think that was always my focus,” she continued. “It has to feel right with everything.”

• The Duffer Brothers Answer Volume 1 Burning Questions
• Noah Schnapp on Will’s Game-Changing Discovery
• Nell Fisher on Playing Holly Wheeler and Working With Sadie Sink
• Cara Buono on Karen Finally Joining the Action
• Sadie Sink on the Max and Venca Plot in Season 5
• The Cast of ‘Stranger Things’ on the Show’s Final Days