Tami Stronach Talks “The NeverEnding Story”'s Legacy and Its Influence on Her New Film, “Man and Witch”

Just in time for the film's 40th anniversary, Tami Stronach is returning to the screen for the first time since 'The NeverEnding Story'

Whether you grew up in the ’80s, ’90s or 2000s, Tami Stronach is almost certainly a part of your childhood. It’s something the 52-year-old actress and dancer hears all the time from fans of The NeverEnding Story.

“It’s really special,” Stronach tells PEOPLE ahead of the release this weekend of her new film Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps. “It doesn’t get old. I feel so lucky to be a positive memory for people. It’s really crazy that I, by happenstance, fell into this thing that allows me to be a part of that.”

Stronach, the daughter of archaeologist parents, was cast in the 1984 film adaptation of German author Michael Ende’s 1979 fantasy novel when she was just 10 years old, reportedly beating out Poltergeist’s Heather O’Rourke for the role of the Childlike Empress. And while her character, the ageless ruler of the magical realm of Fantasia, only appears in two scenes, her remarkably soulful performance and ethereal presence in the film have left an indelible impression on several generations of fans.

According to Stronach, director Wolfgang Petersen gave her little instruction in how to craft the character. “I did the audition three times,” she explains. “So by the time we filmed the actual two scenes — it’s just two scenes, it’s not a lot of material — the director had already seen all the material three times. He kind of knew about the choices that I was making and how I wanted to play her.”

It was only after landing the part that Stronach read Ende’s novel, jotting down adjectives to describe the Childlike Empress in her journal. “I had that she was really sick and she was really weak, and so she couldn’t move. Like, she’s not going to expend extra energy because she just had to be as still as possible to exist for as long as possible. I had that she was just really wise and that that was her superpower — she could just see into people,” Stronach recalls.

“It’s funny,” Stronach adds with a laugh, “because she’s a Childlike Empress, so she’s supposed to be very old. So, for me, as a 10-year-old, I was like, ‘She’s 300 years old.’ And that was the oldest thing I could ever imagine being. Now I’m like, ‘Eh, that’s not that old!’ She could be 10,000 years old. But as a little kid, I was like, ‘I’m gonna make her ancient.’ It was 300, that was the specific number in my book.”

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Another thing that Stronach only later realized helped with her portrayal: losing both her incisors before filming began. The young actress was forced to wear a custom denture — “She’s 300 years old, so it makes sense that she’s gonna wear dentures,” Stronach jokes — in one scene. For her second, Petersen simply instructed her not to open her mouth much.

“My husband, who is an actor, was telling me that he thinks it was a really good directive because it makes [the Childlike Empress] sort of mysterious and she’s so contained,” Stronach says. “But I was just trying to hide my teeth!”

After The NeverEnding Story was released in 1984 and became a sensation in Germany, where Ende’s novel was more well known, Stronach got what she describes as “a very brief taste” of the dark side of childhood stardom and quickly decided to step away from the limelight.

“Because I exited so quickly, it wasn’t really traumatic or anything,” she explains. “But I did have some stalkers. I did have elderly gentlemen giving me wedding rings at 10. There were some scripts that we got that were really inappropriate, and I knew they were inappropriate, and I was like, ‘No way!’ ”

“I think that if I had come from a Hollywood family and had access to great managers, they probably would have known how to block a lot of that stuff,” she continues. “But we just weren’t Hollywood people at all. And so we sort of had a family meeting and were like, ‘We are not equipped for being an actor in the ’80s. There’s just a lot of ways that you could get damaged. How about choosing not to get damaged?’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’ ”

Stronach went on to become a dancer and co-founded both the theater company Shoehorn Theater and the family entertainment focused studio Paper Canoe Company with husband Greg Steinbruner in 2015.

Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps, which will have a limited theatrical run July 28 and 30, is her first feature film since The NeverEnding Story. The indie fantasy comedy about a cursed goatherd (Steinbruner) who turns to a witch (Stronach) for help, is very much in the tradition of films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Princess Bride and, of course, The NeverEnding Story.

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“I was inspired by that thing that The NeverEnding Story does,” Stronach says of Man and Witch, which boasts and impressive cast including Christopher Lloyd, Sean Astin, Eddie Izzard and Jennifer Saunders. “We tapped into that nostalgia. People want to feel hopeful, and I wanted to make a fantasy film, and when you walk out of it you feel more hopeful than when you walked in.”

And nostalgia for The NeverEnding Story has only grown as the 40th anniversary of its release approached this year. While the film was only a modest success in the States in 1984, like so many ’80s fantasy films, it found its audience on VHS and has become a cult classic in the decades since. The film’s theme song was even featured in a 2019 episode of Netflix’s Stranger Things, delighting longtime fans and hooking a whole new generation.

Stronach regularly meets those fans at screenings of the film and fan conventions, occasionally appearing alongside co-star Noah Hathaway, who played Atreyu. ("Definitely fans are super happy when it’s the two of us at the table," she says.)

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“The whole point of The NeverEnding Story is to not have the kid inside you die, right? To have that thing inside of you stay alive that is hopeful and has imagination and courage,” she says of the film’s staying power. “The world kind of beats us all down. And so, I think people are yearning to kind of get back to a simpler time in their lives, or get back to just a feeling of being hopeful.”

“I think fantasy is a really great genre,” she adds. “It tackles real world problems but inside a frame that doesn’t alienate a lot of people. You can contemplate these philosophical questions without a lot of real-world issues sort of scrambling everyone into their corners. And I think because of that, it’s actually a really important genre. And when people think of it as really light-weight, I think that’s a mistake.”

Man and Witch: The Dance of a Thousand Steps screens July 28 and 30 at a theater near you.

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