LOS ANGELES — In an early episode of the new Netflix supernatural drama “Stranger Things,” a single mother played by Winona Ryder sits in a cubby hole communicating with her youngest son through a tangled ball of blinking Christmas lights. He has vanished under mysterious circumstances. To better understand how to sell such a strange, emotional moment, Ms. Ryder looked no further than her own mother, Cynthia Palmer.

“I don’t have kids, so my mom helped me a lot on this,” Ms. Ryder, 44, said while sitting on a big leather couch at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel here, dressed in black jeans and a faded Leonard Cohen T-shirt she bought at a concert in 1988. “I’d call her sometimes and say: ‘Mom, what would you do if every indication is that your child is dead, but you believe that lights are telling you that he isn’t?’ And she’d say: ‘Honey, I’d totally believe that. It’s primal.’”

The pint-size Ms. Ryder storms through “Stranger Things” (available for streaming on July 15), generating what Matt and Ross Duffer, the twins who created the series, described as an essential “Winona-ness,” an air of fragility and feisty determination. “She has a very intense energy about her, Winona does, a wiry unpredictability, a sort of anxiousness that we thought we’d really lean into,” Matt Duffer said about what inspired the brothers to incorporate some of Ms. Ryder’s traits.

Back in the late ’80s and through much of the ’90s, Ms. Ryder, whose godfather was the LSD enthusiast Timothy Leary, was a sort of emblem of cool: dating Johnny Depp and the Soul Asylum frontman Dave Pirner and inspiring an ’80s punk band to call itself the Wynona Riders. According to the Duffers, 32, online reaction to the trailer for “Stranger Things,” which is set in the ’80s, revealed a deep nostalgia for Ms. Ryder. “It’s the Winona Forever fans, there’s just a lot of them,” Matt Duffer said. “She’s such an icon. She certainly hasn’t been forgotten.” He rattled off some of Ms. Ryder’s greatest hits, including two of Tim Burton’s films, “Beetlejuice” and “Edward Scissorhands.” “We grew up on her movies. We were hoping that if we wanted so desperately to see her onscreen that other people would feel that, too.”