The disappearance of Holly Wheeler is behind us; now it’s all about the arrival of Nell Fisher. The young actress already got her horror bona fides in the 2023 standout “Evil Dead Rise,” but she stepped into a much bigger spotlight and spectacle with a starring role in the final season of “Stranger Things.” As Holly Wheeler, sister to beloved series leads Mike Wheeler (Finn Wolfhard) and Nancy Wheeler (Natalia Dyer), Fisher took on the role of an unexpected main player in Season 5, catapulted to the forefront of a TV giant just in time for its grand finale.
As you might expect, the experience was “completely daunting,” Fisher said, recalling her first day on set. “I was ridiculously nervous, especially because my first scene was the breakfast scene with the Wheelers and the Byers, so all the cast were there, these people that I’ve been watching on screen.”
Fortunately, “Stranger Things” had a welcoming ensemble. “They all sort of came up to me at very various points during the day and said that they were excited to work with me and excited to see what I was going to do, which definitely put me at ease,” Fisher recalled.
But ultimately, Holly Wheeler doesn’t spend all that much time with her family once the action gets going in Season 5, and it was none other than Jamie Campbell Bower, the actor behind series big bad Vecna, who Fisher says went above and beyond in making her feel at home before filming started. Specifically, during a table read all the way back in December 2023.
“I was out in Atlanta doing table reading and costume fitting,” Fisher shared, “and during one costume fitting, Jamie Campbell Bower kind of knocked on the door and said, ‘Hi, I just want to say hi to Nell. But, you know, I’m happy to wait.’ And so at the end of his day, he ended up waiting for about 45 minutes just to say hi and introduce himself, which really made me feel like I was wanted there, and made me just excited to begin.”
It was also Bower who Fisher credits with giving her the best advice on set.
“He told me just to absorb, just to learn, to soak everything up,” she recalled, “because I’m kind of very young to be doing this, and I hope to continue doing this Especially when I’ve kind of been surrounded by such incredibly talented people, just to be able to watch and absorb and learn and look, I think it’s always going to be something that you do.”
When it came to finding her footing with the much-expanded character of Holly Wheeler, who had appeared in previous seasons as a toddler – and almost even wandered into her own encounter with the Upside Down, Fisher got some insight from Anniston and Tinsley Price, the actresses who originated the character.
“It was really lovely,” Fisher said. “We kind of just spent some time together, just hanging out, but also talking about Holly, what they thought about her and what I thought about her, and finding a nice kind of middle ground.”
“She’s a very interesting character,” Fisher continued. “She has been there from the start and but she’s not been there like her parents have. She has sort of had these experiences with the Upside Down, and this season for her is like the explanation, and is finally kind of getting to the bottom of all these weird things she’s had happening.”
After their meeting, it was what the Price Twins had to say about Holly’s dynamic with her siblings, Mike and Nancy, that stuck with her the most.
“They mentioned that Holly has an amazing relationship with her siblings and that she really looks up to them. She really admires them and wants to be like them, even though they’ve been off gallivanting on their adventures for the past four years,” Fisher said. “I did really take that, and I’ve got this lovely scene with Finn in Episode 1 where that was quite a key part of that scene.”
Fisher also found plenty of shared qualities between Holly and her Wheeler siblings.
“She’s very stubborn. I think that is probably the defining trait of the Wheelers,” she said. “She knows what she wants, and she’s determined to get it, which, you know, when you’re fighting monsters, is not a bad thing. But she’s also very clever and very insightful, like her older two siblings, and she uses her book ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ to sort of be able to kind of imagine and compare what is real to her to kind of what is in her favorite book, like how Mike compares the Upside Down to his DND games.”
“I really love Holly as a character,” she continued. “ I think she’s got an amazing arc. She develops. She is coming of age. She starts as sort of the object of the story, and things are happening to her, she’s being taken by the Demogorgon, and towards the end of the show, she’s her own person, she’s driving the story.”
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