The last time 19-year-old actress Fina Strazza, star of the new Netflix movie Fear Street: Prom Queen, was in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis lobby in Times Square, she was eight years old.
Then, she was the youngest kid to take on the lead role in Matilda the Musical on Broadway. In between shows, she and her costars treated it as their personal playground. “The kids and I would sneak up to the 14th floor and play tag, because we were just a group of kids, no one was going to stop us,” Strazza remembers, sitting in a high-backed chair in the busy lobby. For her ninth birthday, her parents booked a room for a birthday party and promised chocolate chip cookies. She got so excited she threw up backstage. No cookies after all.
Now, she’s one of the Tony-nominated stars of John Proctor Is the Villain, alongside Sadie Sink, Amalia Yoo, Morgan Scott, and Maggie Kuntz. (Sink is also up for a Tony, as is the play and its director, with the show earning seven nominations total.) Strazza plays Beth Powell, a smart, earnest high schooler who wants to know deeply about the world and her place in it — even when it means questioning what she once thought to be right.
Strazza’s performance is a standout in a cast of standouts and well-written young female characters; we watch, and sympathize, as she reckons with truths that aren’t easy to stomach. At the end of both performances I’ve seen, the audience of primarily teen girls and women had tears streaking down our faces.
“It feels like we almost cast this spell where we just draw it out of you,” Strazza says of the crying. She has now seen the show through the eyes of her sister, too, who has been to three John Proctor performances. “[My sister is] a very strong liberal feminist young woman, and she was really struck by how impactful it feels to see a group of teenage girls command a space like that, and have 800 people in a theater fully focused and listening to them.”
Fina Strazza was born at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City on November 3, 2005, at 2:22 p.m., details she rattles off readily. “Two is a big number for me.” Her first years were spent in the Tudor City apartment complex on the East Side of Manhattan, and then her parents moved the family down to the West Village when she was almost school age (her sister, Nixie, is four years older). Strazza recently bought her first apartment not far from where she grew up. “I feel like the sunlight always looks just right in the trees, in the cherry blossoms, especially in the spring,” she says about the neighborhood.
Her mom (producer and director Rana Strazza) owned a theater company when Strazza was a kid, and that brought her to her first role: Sandy the dog in a production of Annie. She never thought of another career path. A couple years ago, she had a conversation with her dad, who loves theater but works in software, who asked her about her “plan B.” “I was like, ‘I don't have one. There is no plan B.’ I can't imagine doing anything else, ever.”
After Matilda, Strazza acted in a string of Hallmark and straight-to-video movies, network TV guest spots, and short films. In 2022, she was a regular in the Prime Video series Paper Girls, which filmed for seven months and was her biggest role yet. Over time, she got used to the pace of being a child actor, feeling most alive on stage or on set. The time in between projects began to blur; it didn’t feel real. Performing was her real life, striving for the next audition. During her senior year of high school, the actors and writers strikes intervened.
“It was the first time I let go of thinking about that hunger,” she says. “I started a relationship with my first boyfriend, who I'm still with, and I did a play at school, and I just felt like I was living like a kid for the first time. Since then I've eased into being happy with living my day-to-day life and not always feeling this noise that I need to be chasing something, which has been a peaceful realization.” She pauses. “I say this knowing I'm still pretty young and haven't had so much time to think about this stuff yet. It feels like I've lived more years than that.”
Netflix slasher Fear Street: Prom Queen, which filmed for two months last spring in Hamilton, Ontario, felt like a college experience of sorts. A lot of the cast, including Strazza, were away from their families for their first real length of time. Strazza plays queen bee Tiffany Falconer, one of five girls going for prom queen: Lori (India Fowler), Christy (Ariana Greenblatt), Melissa (Ella Rubin), Debbie (Rebecca Ablack). The R.L. Stine adaptation is set in the town of Shadyside, where the previous three Fear Street movies are set (two of which star Sadie Sink).
“Years ago, I worked on Matilda with Sadie's brother, so I've always followed Sadie and supported her from wherever I was, whatever screen I could get my hands on,” Strazza says. “So when the Fear Street movies came out, I watched them and thought they were fun. I've always loved horror. Whenever I was home sick from school, my mom and I would watch marathons of scary movies. Scream, Halloween.”
She leaned into the body horror aspect. At the end of Prom Queen — spoiler alert — Tiffany is impaled on a staircase bannister. Strazza gleefully shows me the photos of her body double, fully impaled and bloodied, on her phone. She’s not usually squeamish, but even she couldn’t totally resist some nausea the first time she saw her severed head in a punch bowl.
“Something about seeing my own decapitated head, it did something to me,” she laughs. “My body malfunctioned. I was like, ‘Oh, I'm not meant to be seeing this right now.’”
She thinks of Prom Queen as being about “taking pride in yourself, and taking and having agency over who you want to become,” which doesn’t sound too far off from the themes in John Proctor. Both about teenagers who definitely aren’t perfect, and who aren’t always making the “right” decision on the first go-round.
A few weeks ago, the Broadway show performed a student-only matinee to 750 New York City high schoolers, not too much younger than Strazza herself, but to her, a world away. “I know I'm not too far out of high school, but I found myself feeling like I needed to be cool while I was up there,” she says.
The performance was an exercise in feeling out of control. The audience was noisy and excited and completely enveloped in the story. They laughed at sad parts and didn’t laugh at certain jokes, like one about being nervous about college applications. That feeling was real to them, not yet a memory. They, too, cried at the end as Lorde’s “Green Light” played throughout the theater and the girls danced wildly on stage. As Strazza’s Beth makes her crucial choice to join them, or not.
“Some people could be ticked off by that [level of energy],” she says, referencing the typically restrained Broadway setting. “But I think we really appreciated hearing what they were thinking, how much they had learned to love the characters … It felt like we were doing something important.”
Strazza looks around at the lobby again and says she feels like she’s waiting on someone to pinch her. At eight years old, she couldn’t imagine this is what lay ahead, that she’d be back here doing this thing she loves in a new way, with so much more to come.
“It's not lost on me that I'm back in Shubert Alley, the same place that I did Matilda 10 years ago,” she says. “I'm having a lot of moments where I'll just sit and think and look around me and be like, ‘I can't believe I'm here.’ I wish I could talk to my eight-year-old self and tell her she'd be back.”
