From ‘Fear Street: Prom Queen’ to ‘John Proctor,’ Tony-Nominated Fina Strazza Is Here to Stay

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.”

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