“She felt like such a huge part of our lives growing up,” says Ross Duffer, who created Stranger Things with his twin brother, Matt. “Once we cast her in season one, that’s when the show found its identity, and it just all clicked into place.”

While Ryder – who’s been in a relationship with fashion designer Scott Mackinlay Hahn since 2011 – doesn’t have children of her own, she calls her young co-stars “my loves”.

“I know it’s such a cliché, but they’re like family. I’d do anything for those kids.”

So, what’s new about playing Joyce this season? “I feel like in the past, she’s trying to figure things out. She’s got the Ouija board on the wall, or [she’s] taping together Will’s drawings. Very crafty.” she explains.

“But this season, she is literally fighting for her survival and to save the people she loves. She doesn’t really have time to plan or use her critical thinking, which was really fun as an actress, actually.”

“In season one, there was a record player, and some of the kids didn’t know what it was. I had to explain what records were,” she says with a laugh. “That was wild to me. And also explaining rotary phones, they just didn’t grow up with them.

“But I really related to the kids and was super protective of them because I had been doing that, working on films at their age.”

Would she have done something like Stranger Things in her teenage Beetlejuice/ Heathers years?

“If Stranger Things was around then, the nostalgia would be like the 1960s? I don’t know,” she says, while pondering aloud. “I was very like my character in Beetlejuice; they actually didn’t have to do a lot to me. I was very pale, I had that hair and I was very monotone.

“That’s why I credit Tim Burton with giving me a career: I was never the first choice for any of those movies in the ’80s.”

Gen X has been labelled the “forgotten generation” between baby boomers and millennials/Gen Z, and it’s something that the actress (regarded as an Gen X icon) feels relieved about.

“[But] I will say this: I’m super grateful that I didn’t grow up with the internet and social media. I don’t think that I could have been an actress if everything was that exposed. It would’ve just flipped me out. There’s a lot of young people who just can’t even imagine a world without the internet.

“I remember the first time I called a boy. You practise, you’re so nervous and you write things down and get up the nerve. It was a real character-building thing. I was 14, and of course it was a disaster, but you learn how to get up the nerve. Kids don’t have to do that any more – they can construct witty texts.”

Meanwhile, Ryder would be down for joining the Beetlejuice sequel that’s rumoured to be in the works.

“I’m really hopeful that it’ll happen,” she says. “The only way we would do it is if everything was perfect and we had all the people – obviously Michael [Keaton] and obviously Tim. That’s what I love about Tim. He’s such a perfectionist. He can’t do something unless it’s completely his vision.

“It’ll happen if it can happen the perfect way.”