“So much boob tape. The girlies know. The fear! Because there’s so many cameras around you.”
Over a Zoom call from London, Amybeth McNulty is casting her mind back to the Stranger Things premiere in Los Angeles earlier this month, when she stepped out of a limousine to greet a phalanx of cameras lined up for the young cast’s red carpet arrival. In a shot preserved on her Instagram (and liked by 120,000 of her 6 million followers), McNulty – smiling with her bright red hair loose around her shoulders and heavily kohl-rimmed eyes – has raised a nervy hand to clamp the billowy silk of her light-as-a-feather, barely-there black dress firmly into place.
For anyone who has ever tried to imagine their way into such a starry setting, the self-consciousness of the gesture was highly relatable. You can take the girl out of the wilds of Donegal and on to the red carpet, but you can’t take the Donegal out of the girl. “You’re going, ‘Everything’s fine’,” McNulty laughs. “‘Get it together. Breathe’. It’s a lot of meditation work beforehand. We’re playing One Direction in the car and I’m going, ‘Everything’s fine’. This is not normal at all in any capacity. That’s the joy of the whole experience: the absurdity of it.”
McNulty, who is from Letterkenny, joined the cast of the Netflix hit series Stranger Things from its third season. She turned 24 years old on the night the premiere for its fifth and final season was held in mid-November. McNulty is familiar with the might and muscle of major productions – she has fans around the world due to her role as the titular character in Anne with an E, the Canadian feminist remake of Anne of Green Gables, which ran for three seasons between 2017 and 2019. But Stranger Things on Netflix dwarfs most everything else in its path.
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Arriving in 2016, the series by the Duffer brothers immediately struck a chord with viewers for its loving depiction of the 1980s in the Midwestern town of Hawkins, Indiana; its Spielberg-like focus on a group of young friends embroiled in a terrifying mystery, and its smartly nostalgic foregrounding of brilliant 1980s songs and icons such as Winona Ryder. In the intervening years, Covid halted production a few times, its young cast members have grown up, and David Harbour, who plays chief of police Jim Hopper, has come under fire for allegations of bullying, but – a decade on – there’s still a sense that the show can harness a rare and elusive magic.
“I watched season one the week it came out,” McNulty says. “I knew from the beginning how sensational it was.” When she auditioned for the show in 2021 to play the role of Vickie, she wasn’t told it was for Stranger Things. “All the characters’ names were different. But I guessed. I looked at the scene and because I was such a big fan of the show I was like, ‘I know exactly what’s going on’. I did a self-tape in Oxfordshire, where I was living at the time. When I got the call, I cried and screamed. It was wild. I have no idea how I got so lucky.”
Today, McNulty has her hair scraped back from her face. She’s wearing silver earrings, minimal make-up and a loose jumper: she looks real and down-to-earth. She brings the same authenticity to her roles. You believe her on screen, whether she’s orphan Anne coming to live at Green Gables in the 1800s, or Vickie, the candy striper student who exchanges longing looks with chatterbox teen Robin, played by Maya Hawke, in Stranger Things.
[ How a Letterkenny teenager shone on the small screen as an ‘accidental feminist’Opens in new window ]
McNulty has always forged her own path in life. An only child raised by her grandparents near Letterkenny, McNulty’s perspective was shaped by home schooling and a sense of difference. “I was shy, anxious. I was awkward. And I was a nerd – I would read five books a day. I was a real nerd about the Victorian era and feminism.” McNulty tried to socialise to “put myself out there”. But it was acting that made her feel, she says, like her bones weren’t disjointed. “Acting gave me access to pretend to be someone cooler and the thing that I wanted to be, like putting on a cloak.”
She performed in amateur productions in An Grianán Theatre in Donegal. At age 10, she landed a role in a production of The Sound of Music in London. At 13, she had a part in the series Clean Break on RTÉ 1. And she sent out self-made tapes to casting directors. Auditioning for Anne with an E, “My wifi couldn’t send the tapes because the files were too big.” So the lads behind the desk at An Grianán did it for her. “It was a full community thing.” She beat off more than 1,800 other contenders to be offered the part, after three live auditions in Canada, and having flown back home to wait for the decision.
When the Canadian producers hired her with five days’ notice to stay for six months filming on Prince Edward Island and in Ontario, McNulty had the drive, ambition and vision to say yes. At 14, she also had luck on her side – her mother was born in Canada, so Amybeth had a Canadian passport, and her grandparents were happy to go with her.
‘Me getting these roles that are quite strong-willed, knowing women, is because that is who I am at my core
— Amybeth McNulty
But the scale of the change was profound. From being a dreamy, homeschooled kid who loved playing in the woods, camping and making up fantasy worlds with her pals, McNulty was thrust into the spotlight. When the trailer for Anne with an E appeared online, the response cut her to the quick. Viewers decried her looks and her accent. “The majority of the first wave of comments was wildly negative,” she says. “That was my first interaction with the negative side of the internet.”
McNulty’s work would soon be recognised and lauded by fans and critics alike. When the show was cancelled after three seasons, the scale of protest was remarkable. An online petition to bring it back attracted 1.5 million signatures, billboard illustrations of McNulty were erected by fans in Toronto and Times Square in New York, and actors including Ryan Reynolds weighed in to add support. But the rollercoaster effect of social media’s Janus-faced glare has stayed with her. “I delete Instagram and Twitter and TikTok off my phone all the time,” she says. “You have to protect yourself.”
With McNulty, the stakes are high. She might not be a well-known name in Ireland or in her adopted home of London, where she has lived for the past five years, but online she’s a sensation. She has 6.4 million followers on Instagram and 4.4 million followers on TikTok. Plenty of fans online rave about her work – since Anne with an E, she has also appeared in films including Black Medicine (2021) and All My Puny Sorrows (2021), the adaptation of the Miriam Toews novel. But there’s more to her than that. Many come for the celebrity wattage, but stay for her candour and depth of emotion.
The two pinned images on McNulty’s Instagram account are not from fancy premieres: they’re pictures of her grandfather and her mother. Her grandfather died in 2023. Her mother died four years ago, in 2021.
“It was my mum’s anniversary yesterday,” she says. “For me, grief feels like this person that shows up on your doorstep, barges into your house, and they make themselves comfortable and tear your house apart. It’s almost like a friendship that I have with grief now. You sit down, have a cup of tea and a conversation: that’s how I visualise it. I find talking about grief and death comforting. I don’t think we as humans speak about it enough. We’re afraid of it.”
On Instagram, McNulty’s first sentence in her tribute to her grandfather is simple and powerful: “Dad.” “I was raised by my grandparents mainly,” she says. “My ‘dad’ was technically my grandad, but he was my dad, you know? I always had that understanding that he and my grandmother would pass sooner, maybe not as soon as they did, but I had that understanding as a kid.”
Her grandparents, who were Scottish and moved to Donegal, taught her to be strong. “They were incredibly political. They really cared about history. They cared about telling me about everything that’s happened in Ireland and in Scotland, and wanting to know where I came from. Dad was a huge feminist and wanted to raise strong women, and he did. Me getting these roles that are quite strong-willed, knowing women, is because that is who I am at my core. I think a casting director can smell that a mile away. It’s not hard to spot in a 12-year-old.”
It’s very rare to have a queer storyline not be the main aspect of a TV show. There’s a casualness about it that’s beautiful
— Amybeth McNulty on Stranger Things
Stranger Things was the last audition McNulty did that her mother and grandfather both knew about. It seemed written in the stars that she would get it. In season two, Jim Hopper reads aloud from Anne of Green Gables to his young charge Eleven – a scene that so excited McNulty that she screen-grabbed it to share on her social media.
When she began filming Stranger Things, McNulty placed a photo of her mother on her door and a “Make Dad proud” sign on her mirror. Both were visible, tangible reminders of their presence in her life. “I’m not sure what I believe in, but I do pray,” she says. “I speak to them frequently. At the London premiere, I was like, ‘I know they’re here,’ and I find that quite comforting.”
McNulty believes in the importance of sharing stories – both her own and the stories she delivers through the characters she plays. “I know a script is good if I have a bit of a cry,” she says. “It’s a human connection of wanting to make someone feel something or feel understood.” For her, Vickie’s storyline as the love interest of Robin came with an added charge and poignancy – that of representation.
“I’m queer myself so I knew what a big deal it was going into it,” McNulty says. “Maya’s coming-out scene before I joined the show was one of the most impactful pieces of queer media I had ever seen in my life. To join her on the show was a huge deal to me. I wanted to do it right, but also just to have the joy of seeing love on a screen, and it’s as simple as that, and now we’re going to go and fight monsters. It’s very rare to have a queer storyline not be the main aspect of a TV show. There’s a casualness about it that’s beautiful.”
The word queer was historically used as a pejorative for the LGBTQ+ community but has been reclaimed in recent decades, and for McNulty, it felt right. “Growing up, it was a thing of, ‘I know I like guys and I know I like girls, and I don’t know what that means, so I’m not going to call myself gay’. It was like, ‘What language can I use?’
“I noticed people started using the word queer more, and I loved it. It’s taking back a word that has been used in a negative connotation as a powerful tool for yourself. It’s the word I use that makes sense for me as a human. I feel it’s all-encompassing of my journey with queerness and sexuality and gender expression.”
[ ‘Anne With an E’ is playful, quaint and undercut with darknessOpens in new window ]
Before McNulty began filming with Maya Hawke, she had no clue that Maya’s parents were Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke, aka indie Hollywood royalty, stars of Kill Bill (Thurman), Before Sunset and Reality Bites (Hawke), and myriad more films.
“I had no idea who her parents were,” she laughs. “I’d done a little bit of Googling obviously, to be like, ‘Who am I working with?’ But that clearly just went over my head.” When the pair met up ahead of filming, “She made me this vegetarian pasta. We just sat and talked about us and our lives and who we are as people, even more than the scene and the work we had to do. Maya is the most calming presence. Any time I would get nervous or anxious, all I would have to do is look at her, and that’s it. There was just something in her of like, ‘You’re good, chill, you’re fine.’ I think building that foundation in our relationship was what was going to make the scene work.”
[ Stranger Things finale review: The double-whammy conclusion will floor fansOpens in new window ]
McNulty isn’t allowed to say anything specific about the plot of season five, unsurprisingly, as Stranger Things is being released in blocks: the first four-set volume is out this week, the second set of three episodes on Christmas Day, and the finale follows on New Year’s Day. But she’s proud of what has been achieved by everyone working on the show.
“I feel so emotional and I’ve only been with the show for what – three years. I’m really excited for people to see it. I think it’s a beautiful ending. They couldn’t have done it any better if they tried.”
The first volume of Stranger Things 5 is out now on Netflix
