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Stranger Things’ Charlie Heaton and Natalia Dyer Take A Lie Detector Test | Vanity Fair

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Two “Stranger Things” co-stars strap into the polygraph and start grilling each other about hair, hometowns and first impressions.

Vanity Fair’s celebrity lie-detector series turned its machine on Natalia Dyer and Charlie Heaton in July 2019, right in the thick of the promotional run for “Stranger Things” Season 3. The real-life couple, who play Nancy Wheeler and Jonathan Byers on the Netflix show, took turns in the hot seat while a polygraph examiner monitored their vital signs and each actor fired off questions of their own. The roughly seven-minute video leans hard into comedy rather than courtroom drama, with both of them laughing their way through answers instead of sticking to clipped yes-or-no responses.

• Dyer questioned Heaton about his British roots, his astrological sign, his musical influences, whether he’d rather be a rock star or have superpowers, fish and chips versus burgers and fries, and whether he’s jealous of Joe Keery’s hair.
• Heaton pressed Dyer on whether she has a winter birthday, where she went to college, her favorite childhood TV shows, her early celebrity crushes, and her honest first impression of him on the “Stranger Things” set.
• The polygraph setup functions as promotional entertainment rather than a rigorous forensic exam, with both actors giving long, conversational answers instead of sticking to strict test protocol.

Heaton Under the Wires

Once Heaton is hooked up, Dyer wastes no time steering the questions toward his identity as the Yorkshire-born half of the pairing. She asks about his astrological sign, digs into who shaped his taste in music, and puts him on the spot about whether he’d rather be a rock star or have actual superpowers — a question that gets at the musician-versus-actor tension Heaton has talked about elsewhere, given his background fronting a band before landing on “Stranger Things.”

The food question — fish and chips against burgers and fries — is as close as the segment gets to a culture-clash bit, playing off Heaton’s English upbringing against his adopted American set life. Dyer also brings up his hometown and personal habits, and doesn’t let him off the hook about Joe Keery’s hair, asking flat-out whether Heaton, playing the moody Jonathan across from Keery’s increasingly iconic Steve Harrington mane, harbors any jealousy about it.

Dyer Takes Her Turn

When the machine swaps to Dyer, Heaton goes for the biographical basics first — whether she has a winter birthday and where she went to college, the kind of detail fans piece together from interviews but rarely hear confirmed on camera. From there he pivots to nostalgia, asking about her favorite shows growing up and her earliest celebrity crush.

The sharpest moment comes when Heaton asks Dyer for her honest, unfiltered first impression of him from their earliest days on the “Stranger Things” set — the kind of question built for a couple who met playing love interests and then became one in real life. It’s less a polygraph gotcha than a setup for the two of them to just talk, which is the whole appeal of the format.

The questions cover astrological signs, fish and chips versus burgers, and Joe Keery’s hair — a polygraph rigged less for catching lies than for cracking up its own subjects.

Comedy Over Interrogation

Nothing about the segment plays like an actual forensic exam. Vanity Fair’s polygraph format has never been about nailing celebrities on secrets; it’s a device for getting co-stars, friends or couples to answer things they might dodge in a standard press junket. Dyer and Heaton lean into that, trading long, chatty answers instead of terse denials, and the machine mostly sits in the background as a prop for the bit rather than an arbiter of truth.

That looseness is the point. Readers curious about how other celebrities handle unscripted grilling — whether it’s a polygraph or a hostile microphone — can find more of that dynamic in pieces like Top 10 Celebrity Comebacks: Stars Silencing Disrespectful Interviewers, though Dyer and Heaton never need to shut anything down here; they’re too busy needling each other over hair and hometowns.

The college question aimed at Dyer also taps into a recurring bit of pop-culture trivia — famous people’s pre-fame lives — the same curiosity that fuels rundowns like Celebs You’d Never Guess Knew Each Other In College. Heaton’s musical-influences answer, meanwhile, plays into his own history as a musician before acting, a detail that separates him from most of his “Stranger Things” castmates.

The video landed squarely inside the Season 3 press cycle, timed to keep Dyer and Heaton in front of cameras answering exactly the kind of questions fans already wanted answered — astrological signs, hair jealousy, and all — without ever needing the machine to actually catch anybody in a lie.