At three years old, Lia Konstantakopoulos would climb onto her family’s coffee table, strike a pose, and proclaim, “I want to be on Broadway!”
Most children who make such declarations spend a lifetime chasing them. Lia—who goes by Lia Christina professionally (“because my last name has 17 letters!”)—made hers come true in just seven years. Last fall, at age 10, she made her Broadway debut as Alice Creel in Stranger Things: The First Shadow.
We meet Lia and her mom, Tara, in a windowless room at the Ridgefield Library on a chilly, gray morning. Yet Lia’s warmth, joie de vivre, and boundless positivity (“this is bigger than our tutoring rooms!”) quickly brighten the space.
“My first show was Moana when I was four,” she begins.
What followed was a dizzying succession of shows that would exhaust even a seasoned professional: Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, The Little Mermaid, Annie, 101 Dalmatians, Beauty and the Beast, Matilda, Legally Blonde Jr., and Mary Poppins. In many, Lia played the lead, singing and dancing as well as acting.
Tara, her husband Nick, and their twin daughters, Lia and Andrea, spent the girls’ early years in Scarsdale, where their love of dance and theater first blossomed.
“Lia and Andrea were competitive dancers,” Tara explains. “Their dance studio had a separate theater division, and that’s where the girls started taking acting classes.”
Tara teaches visually impaired children and Nick owns two family-run seafood wholesalers in Elmsford and Mahopac. When they began to recognize just how talented their daughters were, they made a conscious decision to move to a more arts-friendly community.
“What originally drew us to Ridgefield was the arts,” Tara says. “A.C.T. of Connecticut, the Ridgefield Playhouse. We moved here thinking that one day, the girls might be in a show at A.C.T. of CT. We never imagined Broadway!”
When Lia was nine, she started training with acting coach Denise Simon. She went on to secure a manager, Peggy Becker at Parkside Talent, as well as an agent, Bonnie Shumofsky Bloom at Stewart Talent. All that was left was to land a role.
“I’ve been coaching actors for over 30 years, and I know within minutes when someone truly has what it takes,” Denise tells us. “The moment Lia walked into my studio, I knew she was destined to work professionally. In less than a year, that dream became a reality. There are many elements that make an actor stand out, but one is the indefinable ‘it’ factor. You can’t explain it, but you know it when you see it. Lia has it.”
With Denise’s guidance and her new team in place, Lia soon faced the next big step: auditions. Pretty quickly one came up for Stranger Things: The First Shadow. The show opened in London’s West End in December 2023 to much acclaim and debuted on Broadway April 22, 2025, earning six Tony nominations and taking home three.
A prequel to the hit Netflix series, the show is set in 1959 and features Hopper, Joyce, Bob Newby, and Henry Creel as teenagers at Hawkins High School.
“The role was for Alice Creel and there were only about three lines for the first audition,” Lia says. “Then I was called back for two more auditions, and each time only a few more lines were added. So I knew it was going to be a lot of nonverbal acting.”
Alice Creel is the younger sister of Henry Creel—whom fans of the series know better as Vecna.
“The character of Alice is very similar to Lia’s personality,” Tara says. “Pretty much the only thing they offered by way of describing her was: ‘Loves cute animals.’”
“I love cute animals!” Lia chimes in. “So I thought, I can relate to Alice. I can act like I love cute animals. But I also had to pay attention to the script and understand what was happening in the scene.”
Tara and her husband learned their daughter had booked the role the day before Lia found out.
“Denise and Peggy were on Zoom with me because I had a callback and they wanted me to read lines with them,” Lia recalls. “One of the lines had the word ‘fairytale’ in it and Denise said, ‘Because it’s kind of like a fairytale,’ and Peggy said, ‘Because you booked it!’ And I just started crying. I was thinking about three-year-old me and saying, ‘We did it! We’re actually on Broadway!’ It was one of the best days of my life.”
Rehearsals began the day before Lia’s 10th birthday. After a few days, the cast’s understudies came in to run through the scenes with Lia and her counterpart, Frankie. Then, it was showtime.
“That was it,” Tara says, still in disbelief over how fast it all happened. “They said: ‘They’re ready.’ And both Frankie’s mom and I nearly fell to the floor saying, "What? They’re going on already?”
Lia began homeschooling in October because of her schedule, which puts her at the Marquis Theatre on West 46th Street every day except Mondays. Because of Broadway’s rules for child actors, Lia and Frankie split the eight weekly performances—but both girls are required to be present for every show because the role of Alice does not have an understudy.
Four times each week, Lia takes the stage, credited both as Alice Creel and as part of the Ensemble (in a key scene—you’ll have to see the show to find out).
In a season of unforgettable events, December 19 added another to Lia’s rapidly expanding list. Jamie Campbell Bower, known for his roles in Twilight and Harry Potter, and who plays Vecna in the Netflix series, made a surprise cameo as his Broadway counterpart on a night that Lia happened to be performing.
“We were on our way back to Ridgefield and my phone kept going off,” Tara says. “Text after text was rolling in saying that Lia’s photo was in People magazine!”
“The photo was everywhere—and they used my name!” Lia says, her excitement still palpable. (Child actors are not frequently credited.) “Jamie is honestly one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. But I said to him, ‘Jamie, in season five, you absolutely terrified me!’”
Lia has navigated her new world with remarkable composure. She gets home after midnight most nights but is full of energy. Her friendships have shifted (“It was hard to explain that I have an agent and a manager without sounding like I was bragging—I wasn’t.”), but she maintains a positive outlook (“I’m happy to be homeschooled because it gives me a lot more flexibility.”) She’s dealt with the sometimes-intrusive fan requests for autographs and videos masterfully.
“It's been an incredible ride,” Tara says. “The entire experience has been surreal. Watching her perform on a Broadway stage, then seeing her sign autographs for fans. And afterward she comes over and she’s just our 10-year-old Lia again.”
Lia’s contract runs through April, and she hopes it will be renewed.
“It’s chaotic,” she says. “And I love it. I would continue acting for billions of years—if I was still alive then!”
For now, at least, she’s exactly where she wants to be: on stage. And the lights—and pyrotechnics—are even more powerful than three-year-old Lia could have possibly imagined.