You’ve Seen Her on Stranger Things. Here’s What Nobody Knew About This Navy Veteran.
Jennifer Marshall, U.S. Navy Veteran, actress, firefighter EMT, cancer survivor, tells their story to Vegas Veteran Voices, a Veteran-led nonprofit in Las Vegas.
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- In this story
- Jennifer Marshall, U.S. Navy Veteran, actress, firefighter EMT, cancer survivor
- Service branch
- U.S. Navy
- Published
- Running time
- 1 hour 1 minute (1:01:53)
- Production
- Filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Veteran-led nonprofit in Las Vegas
“I think there’s something about Veterans that public service lines up with who we are as people.”
About this story
She shot an entire season of Stranger Things with cancer. No one on set knew.
Jennifer Marshall is a Navy Veteran, actress, firefighter EMT, and cancer survivor who has spent her life showing up when every reasonable person would have stayed home. She enlisted at 17 from a small mountain town in Colorado, her words: "poverty and bad decisions." She served in support of OIF, got out, earned her degree Magna Cum Laude, became a licensed private investigator, moved to Los Angeles with no connections, and built a 50+ credit career in film and television, including a recurring role on Netflix's Stranger Things, plus NCIS, Reacher, The Terminal List, and hosting Mysteries Decoded on the CW.
Then came 2020. She recommissioned into the California State Guard. Then came the diagnosis, metastatic melanoma. She resigned her commission, spent 14 months in treatment, and went straight back to work. Including shooting an entire season of one of the most-watched shows on the planet while her hair was falling out and her body was breaking down. She told no one. Until the last day.
This is the conversation Hollywood never gave her. No publicist. No approved talking points. No polished version of the story.
They cover what it actually costs to build a career in an industry that will look you in the face and tell you to change everything about yourself, and why she walked away anyway. They talk about shooting through cancer, what happened when she finally told the truth, and what the silence that followed actually meant. They talk about trading red carpets for ambulance shifts at $16 an hour, and why she has never been happier. They talk about sexual assault, healing, and the place she least expected to find both. And they talk about what Veterans carry out of the military that the civilian world has no idea how to hold.
Jennifer Marshall does not do the polished version. She does the real one.
If anything in this episode brought something up for you:
RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673 | rainn.org
Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741
Vegas Veteran Voices is a Veteran-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit media company based in Las Vegas. We tell Veteran stories, all branches, all ranks, no filter, through cinematic long-form conversations that the Veteran community deserves and the world needs to hear.
vegasveteranvoices.com
In their words
“I definitely do what I want and I serve the community that I love and I do the best by my kids that I can.”
