Grace Van Dien, at the Stranger Things season four premiere in May 2022, says she’s going to be more selective with the acting jobs she takes after being sexually harassed by a producer on a recent film project. (Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)
Grace Van Dien has been put off by the entertainment industry.
Having grown up as Hollywood royalty, the great-granddaughter of movie legend Robert Mitchum, the 26-year-old has treaded a similar, though more modern, path into acting —first as a reality TV star with her famous family at age 9 and more recently in Stranger Things. But she’s now “turning down acting projects” after experiencing sexual harassment in the workplace.
In a live video on the gaming streaming service Twitch, Van Dien, who played cheerleader Chrissy Cunningham in Season 4 of the hit Netflix show, said, “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.”
She said while making a recent movie, “one of the producers,” whom she didn’t name, “hired a girl that he was sleeping with and then he had her ask me to have a threesome with them. So, like, that’s my boss.”
Van Dien said she refused, but “I cried” and “was so upset” by the bad workplace experience.
She said she’s going to focus on Twitch streaming right now instead of new acting roles. On the platform, she streams herself playing videos games, including Fortnite and others and has built a following over 200,000.
She later added on Twitter, “As I get older, my work priorities are changing.” She said she’s now “waiting for the right project” with “the right people” before jumping into something new. She added, “It’s nice to feel calm.”
Van Dien, the daughter of Casper Van Dien and Carrie Mitchum, who split when she was a baby, appeared with her father and then-stepmother, Catherine Oxenberg, in the 2005 reality show I Married a Princess. She went on to appear with her dad and Oxenberg in 2014’s Sleeping Beauty, and then had many small roles in TV shows and films. In 2017, she landed a starring role in Netflix’s tween drama Greenhouse Academy, which she played until 2019 — the same year she appeared on NBC’s The Village. She also played Sharon Tate in the 2018 film Charlie Says. Since 2020, Van Dien has made about seven different films, mostly independent ones.
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