Sadie Sink’s Brand New Day

It’s impossible to miss Sadie Sink — her fiery beach waves are so instantly recognizable that they can pierce through even the brightest of sunny days. She tucks herself into the plush corner booth of a French eatery in Notting Hill and orders an iced matcha latte with coconut milk, without so much as a glance at the menu. She doesn’t need to check: She’s been committing the neighborhood to memory for about a year, frequenting the same Pilates studios, shops, and restaurants, and settling into a familiar daily routine that, unlike most area residents, typically ends on the adrenaline-fueled high of performing Romeo & Juliet on the West End.

If Sink has been growing accustomed to the rhythms of London life, something she’s still coming to grips with is the town’s infamous weather. When we meet, we’re at the tail end of a heat wave that has been holding the city hostage. “I’m dealing with the lack of AC,” says Sink, who was born in central Texas. “God, it’s been a journey.” I’d seen Sink in the play the previous week, conveniently at what might’ve been the absolute worst time to spend three hours in a 150-year-old theater that’s unequipped for the heat, with glasses of wine turning lukewarm long before intermission and audience members using used programs as makeshift fans. “Last week was tough, because I could feel the audience just draining and draining and draining as it went on,” Sink says. “I was like, ‘Oh God, please, guys, stay with us. I’m here with you, I promise!’”

Sink, 24, first arrived in London last summer and simply decided to stay put. Before she knew it, her cats, Fifi and Pippin, had joined her in Notting Hill. At the time, she had just completed her acclaimed turn in the Broadway play John Proctor Is the Villain, which earned her a Tony nomination, and hopped on a plane across the Atlantic to shoot Spider-Man: Brand New Day in the U.K. Then came the conclusion of Stranger Things, which had been the one constant in Sink’s life for nearly a decade. So how do you follow up a breakout role on one of the definitive shows of the streaming era? For Sink, the answer was to double down on the stage, where her career first began as a child actress in an Annie revival on Broadway. So far, it’s been a healing homecoming for her, the kickoff to what you — and she — might call Sadie Sink’s Year of Recalibration.

Sink felt ready to part ways with Max Mayfield, the character that had been at the epicenter of her life for four seasons of Stranger Things — though that made the moment no less pivotal. She didn’t feel emotional when she and her fellow castmates first sat in a theater to watch the finale together, but when the episode hit Netflix on New Year’s Eve, the reality hit her. “I was watching it with my brother and he started crying and then I started crying,” she says. Caleb McLaughlin, who plays Max’s boyfriend, Lucas, had also joined them. “He was looking at us like, ‘Are you guys crying?!’”

“It was just completely bittersweet,” she says. Sink had, after all, grown up with Max and the rest of the cast. “It’s been 10 years. It’s seen us through so many different phases of our lives. All good things must end.”

Sink’s time as a temporary Londoner will soon come to an end too. “It’s felt like such a chapter, being in London and really feeling like I’ve made a home for myself here,” she says. Once Romeo & Juliet’s run concludes in a few short weeks, she’ll pack up her things — and her felines — and head back to New York. “So to leave it and go back to my actual home, I’m like, ‘Wait, I don’t know… ’” she says, her voice trailing off slightly mournfully. “But it’ll be good. I miss my home. The cats are ready to go back. They’re telling me all the time.”

When Sink first touched down here, her initial plan was to stay in town for the length of the Spider-Man shoot, but then Romeo & Juliet came calling. “I was in no way on the market to do another play,” Sink says, until she met with director and playwright Robert Icke, who has been called “the great hope of British theater.” “I really thought after I finished the last one: ‘I’m going to take a break.’” Icke persuaded her to give the play a shot; in turn, she suggested she audition for him, as he’d never seen her work before (not even Stranger Things). “I was never really drawn to Juliet as a character, and I just pictured her fawning over a balcony, which is fine,” she says, summoning her former skepticism. “I was just like, ‘Is there much there?’” Sink then spent the fall ping-ponging between the Spider-Man set and intensely studying the text with Icke. “The juxtaposition was nice.”

“I knew Marvel was a big deal, but it feels really big. These blockbuster movies are a whole different beast.”

In that time, she discovered she had underestimated Juliet. “She soliloquizes a lot,” Sink continues. “She’s talking a lot, and I was really drawn to the fact that she has such a rich inner world, and that’s clear in all of her soliloquies. She has these really big ideas, yet she lives in isolation for the most part, so she’s clearly developed this resilience and emotional intelligence and had to be her own entertainment and friend.” Falling headfirst for Romeo, Sink explains, provides an outlet for the enormous feelings she’s had to keep contained to herself. “As someone who spends a lot of time alone, I was like, ‘Oh, actually, I relate to that a lot.’”

Icke’s modern retelling of the Shakespearean romance takes a Sliding Doors-style structure: At critical junctures in the story, scenes play out twice with slight changes to imagine whether the young lovers’ tragic fate could’ve been avoided had they made different choices. There’s also a distinctly adolescent energy to the dynamic between Sink’s Juliet and her Romeo, played by Hamnet and A Quiet Place star Noah Jupe. The centerpiece of the production’s sparse set is a king-size bed, where Juliet throws herself to scream into her pillow and kick her feet in glee as love consumes her. “You have to remember, even though it is a beautiful love story — the greatest one ever told, one might say — you want to sell it as so romantic and that they’re so meant to be, but when you’re actually falling in love for the first time and you’re a teenager, it’s torture,” Sink says, practically quoting her All Too Well: The Short Film collaborator Taylor Swift.

John Proctor and now Romeo & Juliet are the first theater roles Sink has taken on in 10 years — nearly half a lifetime ago in her case. As a kid, acting had been in her crosshairs ever since she obsessed over classic Disney Channel shows like That’s So Raven and Good Luck Charlie. Once Sink proved to her parents that she was serious about acting professionally through local and regional productions, the family moved the 1,700 miles to New Jersey, where they settled as Sink cut her teeth as a child star on Broadway.

“I am filled with so much rage when I see, like, three iPhones in the audience.”

At first, she thrived. Then, toward the end of her run in the title role of Annie, pulling off eight shows a week, she would experience unsettling feelings onstage that she lacked the vocabulary to describe. She realized later in life that they were panic attacks. “As a 10-year-old, it’s enough to scare you away from ever putting yourself in a situation that’s going to trigger that kind of reaction again, which it did,” Sink says. “And mainly with singing. I was like, ‘I don’t really have any interest in singing onstage anymore.’” Times have changed: Now multiple children are cast in the same role in major theater productions.

John Proctor Is the Villain — playwright Kimberly Belflower’s Tony-nominated modern take on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible — was a test of whether Sink could overcome that once-debilitating fear. “I had so much fun on that show, and it was so rewarding in so many ways,” says Sink (who will executive-produce its upcoming film adaptation). “It really did break the ice for me getting back into theater.” Still, she tells me that she “held back a little bit” as she refamiliarized herself with performing onstage.

That, at least in part, is why last year’s Tony nomination came as such a surprise. Her older brother Mitchell tried to prepare her: The pair are die-hard theater nerds who treat awards season as sport, and the night before nominations, like every year, he ran through his ballot. “He was like, ‘OK, and so for Leading Actor in a Play, these are my predictions,’” Sink says. “Then he said my name, and I was like, ‘Don’t put mine.’ He was like, ‘No, Sadie, you’re probably going to get it.’” The unwavering confidence he had in his prediction gave her a glimmer of hope that it might actually happen.

“It was so exciting just because I love the Tonys, I love theater,” she says. “I’ve never been nominated for any kind of award like that. For the first time that happens, for it to be the Tonys — it feels really important to me and very unexpected.” It was validation that, despite struggling initially, she was doing something right by returning to theater. “It was a new space, or a space that I was rediscovering. I felt a lot more sensitive or vulnerable. So to have that recognition, after having gone through the whole spiral of self-doubt and ‘Oh my God, am I even good at this,’ felt like.. oh! OK!”

“You’re letting real parts of yourself bleed out. To switch it off and go and meet fans afterwards, it shocked my system a bit.”

If John Proctor was a test run with stakes equivalent to cycling on a cliff edge with training wheels, Romeo & Juliet is where she fell back into the groove. Sink says she knew she “could take it a step further” by acting in a show that’s twice as long and packed with denser language, and yet she managed to “reach a complete level of comfort onstage that I only really tapped into towards the end of the run of the last play I did. And I think I found that on the first couple performances of Romeo & Juliet. I really felt so collected.”

Sink had officially fallen in love with being onstage again. “I think theater will always be a priority for me,” she says. “I love filming TV, too, and there’s so many things that I want to do in that space as well, but I think the work that I have [accomplished] just in the last two plays that I’ve done, it feels like” — she takes a beat to think — “I don’t know, it just feels right.” So it wasn’t just the sunshine that made Sink appear lighter. When she laughs, every facial muscle is put to work: Her smile stretches wide, her eyes squeeze shut. There’s a delight — a giddiness — to it.

Not that Sink will be leaving screens anytime soon. This summer brings her into the Spider-Man universe, which, unsurprisingly, she can say very little about. Sink’s role remains a closely guarded secret that she has had no trouble keeping, what with nine years of experience in hiding Stranger Things spoilers. (“You just don’t share the secret, it’s not that hard,” she says, laughing.) Sometimes even she wasn’t privy to the details: Sink was offered her role without an audition, having worked with director Destin Daniel Cretton on the 2017 film The Glass Castle, and she didn’t receive a script until she landed in London.

When young stars are brought into the fold of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s often something you have to prepare for. A higher-up typically sits you down to tell you that soon the ground will shift beneath your feet as your life irrevocably changes forever. But Sink, despite her youth, is in a unique position where stratospheric propulsion is almost old hat. Or at least oldish hat: Being at the center of a speculative storm of fan theories around Sink’s character has still been eye-opening. “I knew that Marvel was a big deal and had a big brand, especially Spider-Man,” she says. “I know there’s a huge fan base, but it feels really big. I think these blockbuster movies are a whole different beast.”

She credits costar Tom Holland with helping orient her. “It was interesting stepping into that space and being a little bit of an outsider in that way, but he could not have been more welcoming, and just the whole crew in general,” she says. “He was just so relaxed and open, and I felt very at ease.”

“To have that recognition, after having gone through the whole spiral of self-doubt and ‘Oh my God, am I even good at this,’ felt like.. oh! OK!”

The fame side of it all has been more familiar to Sink, who’s navigated it under the watchful eye of her 32 million Instagram followers. She’s been learning to set boundaries for years: It’s not uncommon for fans to turn up to the stage door of the Harold Pinter Theatre before the show as well as afterward.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently because on the last play I did [John Proctor Is the Villain], I was able to do stage door every single night, and it wasn’t an issue for me,” Sink says. “I really liked meeting people and fans after the show. And for this one, I did it for the first couple of weeks, and then I just couldn’t. This might not make any sense, but I think what it was is: I’d be onstage and showing very real parts of myself. It’s secret, but it’s very real, and I think I can be really guarded in real life. And so when I have permission to let those guards down, and you’re there with 800 people, but you’re just letting real parts of yourself bleed out — to switch it off and go and meet fans afterwards, it shocked my system a bit to put all those guards back up.”

She’s also, frankly, usually exhausted after exerting herself via soliloquies for three hours. Her reliable method for decompressing after a long show is, she tells me sheepishly, a mindless TikTok scroll. “Once I decide to delete it, I have no withdrawals, I’m OK,” she reasons. “But when it is on my phone, it’s just pure entertainment.” Thankfully, her rabbit holes are far from the brain-rot corners of the internet. (Her last one was orcas.)

I ask Sink how she has found theater etiquette during her time on the West End. For the most part, audiences have been well-behaved, but it’s the swiftness with which everyone grabs their phone at curtain call that stuns her. The knife is still plunged into Juliet’s abdomen when Sink hears the telltale shuffling in seats. “The lights go off, and then I just see all these faces in the audience because everyone is turning their phone on,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Guys, give it a minute. Take it in for a second!’”

Sometimes, the cameras are up long before. “I am filled with so much rage when I see, like, three iPhones in the audience,” Sink says — though she’s cognizant that she used to be one of those fans who escaped to her bedroom to devour bootlegs online. (Or “slime tutorials,” as she’s well aware they go by now.) “They raised me, those bootlegs, and inspired me so much. That’s why we need to make theater very accessible, so that everyone can go in and see it, but also people from all over the world. That wasn’t accessible to me in Texas, so I get it, but wait for the pro-shot.”

After spending the better part of a year settling into well-oiled routines, Sink doesn’t know what’s ahead of her when she gets home to New York beyond a house that’s been sitting dormant for too long and a garden she’s excited to tend to. For now, she’s focused on today: She’ll dip into the nearby bookstore to pick up a book she ordered — A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by French theorist Roland Barthes — and then it’s back to the theater, for one more round of falling in love and swallowing the fear.

Top image credit: Marni clothing, socks and shoes; Pebble London ring.