Grace Van Dien: the horrible reason why she has taken an acting hiatus
Being Hollywood royalty doesn't mean that you are safe from experiencing things that the #MeToo movement has been trying to fight for years. Grace Van Dien is the perfect example of that.
The actress, who joined the cast of 'Stranger Things' in season 4, is the daughter of actor Casper Van Dien and is the great-granddaughter of Robert Mitchum. And despite that, she has experienced the darkest side of the industry.
Before starring in the Netflix show in the role of Chrissy Cunningham, Grace Van Dien was famous in the gaming world and Twitch and has an important fan-based community.
Image: Stranger Things - Netflix
It is precisely on her Twitch channel, called 'BlueFille', where Grace Van Dien has revealed the terrible experience she had in Hollywood that made her put a halt in her acting career.
Image: Stranger Things - Netflix
The actress started sharing her story on the channel: "In one of the last movies I did, one of the producers hired a girl that he was sleeping with."
As problematic as that sound, the worst thing is that said producer (of which Grace hasn't said the name) went beyond that: "He had her ask me to have a threesome with them. So... like, that's my boss. And then I didn't and I cried and I was so upset."
Grace Van Dien who was used to the community and family feeling of her channel on Twitch, confessed that she felt safer in that online space than in some of the filming sets she has worked.
The girl added: "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."
The actress continued to explain how Twitch was a comfortable space for her: "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. And with streaming, I get to choose who I hang out with, who I talk to…"
That's why the actress has decided to turn down some film roles in order to focus on her content-creating side. A hiatus in a promising career like hers, even more so after the success of her character in 'Stranger Things', gives us an idea of how hard the experience must have been for the actress.
The producer the actress is talking about not only did abuse his privileged position to hire her lover but also used said woman to ask the young actress for that dishonest proposal.
Van Dien told her manager what had happened and during the last few weeks of filming, another actress helped Grace: "My castmate, she was there with me and was like, 'You want to go take a walk?' I was like, yeah. And we just had a miserable time. We cried a lot on that shoot."
It's hard to guess which project is the one where Grace Van Dien had that terrible experience because the actress has been involved in many, although none of them were as successful as 'Stranger Things'.
The young actress has starred in the TV shows 'The Village' (2019) and 'Greenhouse Academy' (2017-2019). However, she revealed that everything happened during the filming of one of her last movies.
Her last works in cinema are: 'Charlie Says' (2018), 'Lady Driver' (2020), 'Riding Faith' (2020), 'The Binge' (2020), 'What Comes Around' (2022), 'V for Vengeance' (2022), 'The Fix' (2022), and 'Aaah! Roach!' (2023).
We don't know when the actress will come back to work in the industry, but Grace Van Dien is certain that it will be behind the cameras: "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?"