'Stranger Things' star Grace Van Dien says she's focusing on Twitch streaming instead of acting after a movie producer made unwanted sexual advance on set
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- Grace Van Dien said she encountered an unwanted sexual advance on the set of one of her last movies.
- On a Twitch stream, she said that a producer proposed a threesome with her and another actor.
- The "Stranger Things" star said was "so upset" she has taken a break from acting as a result.
"Stranger Things" star Grace Van Dien has said that a movie producer made unwanted sexual advances toward her on set, leading to her becoming more selective with her acting projects.
In a Twitch stream on Tuesday, Van Dien, who portrayed cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham in the most recent season of the Netflix series, said that she has turned down four movie roles in the last two and a half weeks.
The actor explained that instead, she has chosen to focus her time on making money from Twitch, a live-streaming platform for gamers where she goes by the handle @bluefille and has 293,000 followers.
The 26-year-old star said that while she understood that some of her fans were "upset" about her turning down acting projects, "the fact of the matter is the last few projects I've worked on I didn't have the best experiences with some of the people I had to work for."
"One of the last movies I did, one of the producers asked me to — like, he hired a girl that he was sleeping with and then he had her ask me to have a threesome with them," she said, per IndieWire.
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"So, that's my boss. And then I didn't — and I cried and I was so upset," she continued. "But when people are like, 'How is streaming better for your mental health?' That's how. I get to stay inside my house and play video games and I don't have my boss asking me to have sex with them."
Van Dien, who is the daughter of daytime soap actor Casper Van Dien and great-granddaughter of Golden Age star Robert Mitchum, did not name the production in question, but says she "handled it the right way."
"I told my management. My castmate, she was there with me and was like, 'Did I just hear that correctly?' And I was like, 'Yeah.' And she was like, 'Want to go talk a walk?' I was like, 'Yeah.' And we just had a miserable time. We cried a lot on that shoot."
Van Dien concluded: "That's why I'm going to stick to streaming for a little bit, and I hope that's not a huge wrench in your plans for me, but I'm happy here.
"And I'm developing my own projects and I'm hoping that someone decides to fund them because then I can be in control of my own set and I'm not going to ask my actors to sleep with me, so that's cool, right?"
On Thursday, after news outlets began to report her comments, Van Dien tweeted: "as i get older, my work priorities are changing. i'm waiting for the right project/the right people to work with. ????????it's nice to feel calm."
—Grace Van Dien (@GraceVanDien) March 9, 2023