Sadie Sink knows you’re snapping a picture of her. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying for a covert shot or an inconspicuous selfie where she just happens to be in the background, she can always tell. Sink has been recognizable for a while now, having spent nearly a decade on Stranger Things, one of the most popular and critically-acclaimed shows of the streaming era.
It used to paralyze her a bit, that visibility. The idea of going outside meant signing up for something: an innocuous hug or hello, a photo, a less definable gesture? She was expected to give a piece of herself — or maybe the whole thing if the fame monster was let loose. A creature from the Upside Down chasing her, or us, in a labyrinth, feeding on likes, the temporary serotonin rush, bits of flesh.
Then she realized she could just say no. “When I was younger I felt like I had to say yes to everyone,” Sink tells Teen Vogue. It made her nervous. “You can say no, and that's fine. And I’m not being rude. It's just, I don't have to. That's been a change for me in the past, like, year or two, honestly.”
This is the approach she takes when two young women come up to our table at a coffee shop in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood. “I’m sorry, I’m in the middle of an interview,” she demures with an apologetic smile. They back away, apologetic too. No harm done.
“But there's still always that little voice,” Sink admits after. “It's like, Oh my God, I'm so rude.”
She’s developed a sort of filter for the public over the years, an “instinctual protection” of parts of who she is. This doesn’t mean that sitting here, wearing a gray sweater and loose trousers, is some sort of character version of Sadie Sink. “This is me!” she says, putting on a floaty, dramatic Greatest Showman-type voice. “There's no persona I've created at all. It's just me, but like, a sliver.”
A few days after our first conversation, Sink’s Stranger Things costar Millie Bobby Brown shared a plaintive video calling out people (and the media, specifically) who pick apart her appearance as they watch her grow into an adult, not liking what they see. “Disillusioned people,” she said, “can’t handle seeing a girl become a woman on her terms, not their own.”
Brown’s words, unknowingly, could be a thesis statement for Sink’s next project: a Broadway play called John Proctor Is the Villain. The play tells the story of a group of MeToo-era high schoolers in Appalachia who read The Crucible, then begin to question what they’ve been taught about the world, and they consider how they might reimagine it as something more habitable for teenage girls — maybe even something beautiful.
“I had a little bit of a different experience, but I can relate to everything she said,” Sink says over the phone about Brown’s statement. “I mean, as women and just as human beings, we naturally grow up and find ourselves. Doing that in the public eye, under scrutiny, definitely is this added pressure that men do not receive. Especially, like Millie was saying, someone who's been known as a child on TV and then is coming into adulthood. It's not necessarily the kindest place to do that in this industry, and to do it so publicly.”
In John Proctor, Sink plays Shelby, a fierce, whip-smart teen who sits at the center of swirling drama in her friend group and their very Christian small town. She is joined by Raelynn (Amalia Yoo), Beth (Fina Strazza), Nell (Morgan Scott), and Ivy (Maggie Kuntz) as the core group of girls in the play, which takes place in just one set piece, a classroom. As the girls read, they begin to empathize more with the women in Arthur Miller’s classic play about the Salem witch trials, including Abigail Williams, a teenager exploited and condemned by the adult men around her, and Elizabeth Proctor, a wronged woman guilted into moral righteousness in the face of her husband’s affair. As the play progresses, Shelby and the other girls begin to unlock their power, challenging their teacher and rewriting the narrative on their own terms.
It was an attractive story to tell for Sink, who had been looking for a post-Stranger Things return to Broadway for the first time since she was a child, when she acted alongside Helen Mirren in The Audience (before that, she started her professional career in Annie). Says John Proctor playwright Kimberly Belflower, Sink knew she wanted to be part of an ensemble cast and tell a story about young people her age: “[Sink] really, really identified with Shelby immediately,” she recalls.
“We've talked a lot about Shelby being, partly because of the trauma she has endured, a million years older than her peers,” Belflower continues. “I think Sadie growing up in this industry, and doing so much at a young age, does make her very wise and very poised in this way that contributes a lot to Shelby.” Meanwhile, the play’s director, Danya Tamor, calls Sink “totally fearless.”
Sink does see bits of her own story in the play’s setting. “I know what it feels like to live in such a small bubble,” she says. “That's what I grew up in, and that sense of community and the role that the church plays in that, and how that can really warp some views and just make your world seem a lot smaller.”
Sink, 22, grew up in Brenham, Texas (population under 20,000). She was the energetic, theatrical kid of two teachers, with three older brothers (Caleb, Spencer, and Mitchell), and a younger sister (Jacey) came along later. Sink has blue eyes like her dad and the heart-shaped face of her mom. Her parents are both kind and hardworking, she says, and definitely “a family of people-pleasers.”
Her brothers had to share a room growing up, but Sink had her own, where she would lie on her daybed with the purple quilt her grandmother made, playing with her American Girl doll Emily (in the canon, Emily was a friend of Molly’s who stayed with the family during World War II). Sink’s parents took the family to church twice a week, more for the community influence than out of strict religious practice. And she was always encouraged to follow her dreams — encouragement that led her to performing in Annie on Broadway when she was 10 years old.
Very early on, Sink internalized a message about who she could become: “I was brought up in the age of girl power. The commercials and all the T-shirts are saying girls can do anything boys can do,” she remembers. The year she turned 12, in 2014, the famous “Run Like a Girl” advertisement for the brand Always called attention to the prevalence of negative stereotypes about girls, and asserted that girls’ self-esteem often drops between the ages of 10 and 12 as they go through puberty.
Then, two years later, the United States elected a president whom dozens of women had accused of sexual misconduct.
As Sink got older and her career in Hollywood progressed, she wondered about all of this: the messages that encourage girls to be tough, the proposed sense of equality, her own self-confidence. “You reach a point where you become a teenager and you're like, Oh, is that actually true? Do I actually feel that sense of empowerment?”
By age 15, Sink had filmed the second season of Stranger Things, and she’d become a household name as spirited skateboarder Max Mayfield. “Season two had kind of just come out, so I was still getting used to even being in the industry, where all of these things were coming out,” she says. By the time she was 16, MeToo had shaken up Hollywood and sparked activism around the world. She remembers feeling overwhelmed but hopeful, talking about feminism with friends at the time. But there was also this new reality, where she was more grown up, and more aware of how much exploitation is out there — and more exposed as an actor and a young woman.
“There was definitely a shift in mentality when you start being perceived as a woman,” Sink notes. “There's just this whole other part of feminism and womanhood that becomes clearer the older you get, in different ways. You have to start looking out for yourself and defending yourself…. As I was turning 18, 19, I don't want to say it took a darker turn, but it kind of became scarier.”
It’s not lost on the writer, director, or star of John Proctor Is the Villain that we are once again living under that aforementioned president, who has now been held liable in court for sexual abuse against one of his accusers. The girls in MeToo-era rural Georgia feel a world away in their innocence and optimism and, simultaneously, more timely and crucial in their worldview than ever.
“I think about what has changed between now and then,” Sink muses. “Things may look a little bit different, but… are they, you know?” The final powerful monologue in the play, from Raelynn, sticks out to her. “[It’s about how], one day, these men won't be in charge anymore. I just got chills right now thinking about it…. There was hope for that, and now we're back here.”
But a sense of hopelessness doesn’t define the play — or the point Sink is at in her own life. “I feel so safe and inspired by the people I'm with right now on this play, and the conversations we're having,” she says. “During a time where, like, every day there's something new in this administration that gets you down, having that place to go to every day, it's like, Okay, we're working on something. We're creating something that's important. Find that sense of community, that outlet for you.”
Sink sees a throughline in her characters as strong young women who are discovering their voices and testing their agency: There’s Max, of course; Shelby; Ellie from the Oscar-winning Darren Aronofsky film The Whale; the folk hero O’Dessa from the apocalyptic rock opera of the same name (which came out last month on Hulu); and even her character in 2021’s All Too Well: The Short Film, as a young Taylor Swift of sorts.
John Proctor Is the Villain, coincidentally, makes various references to Swift playfully, but also in regard to her sexual assault lawsuit and the power imbalances in her relationships when she was a late teen dating men in their late 20s and early 30s. Sink helped bring some of the latter to life in the short film, directed by Swift, in which Sink, then 19, acted alongside 30-year-old Dylan O’Brien, mirroring a real-life age gap for Swift.
Swift has been a pop culture force for so long that sometimes it’s hard to remember how young she once was, but Sink, fresh-faced and innocent, hammers the point home: “I remember some people were really weirded out by the age difference [in the short film],” she recalls. “Like, ‘Why would they cast these two actors together with this age gap?’ I'm like, ‘What? It was true to her.’”
Sink is, of course, a Swift fan. Her favorite Tortured Poets track is “The Bolter,” which she sheepishly admits relating to. But she also deeply admires Swift as a director, and she’d definitely collaborate with her again should Swift’s feature directorial career commence. “[She] knows what she's doing,” Sink says. “She knows what she wants, and also, she’s so personable and fun to be around and comfortable. That was really good for me. I loved working with her.”
The All Too Well role inadvertently kicked off a major turning point in Sink’s career. A few months later she had the starring arc of Stranger Things 4, bringing new depth to Max, who spent the season reeling from the death of her brother and continued attacks from the Mind Flayer. With Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” as the soundtrack gone viral, audiences watched as Max dealt with grief, depression, and fought monsters with the help of her friends.
There was, Sink reveals, a moment when she thought her character would die by the end of season four. “After I'd read episodes like six, seven, and we're gearing up for that final battle, I was like, Oh, there's a world where this doesn't end well and this is my last season,” she says with a laugh. “But then I got a call from the Duffer brothers and they were like, ‘Just so you know, this is happening in the final episode. So just prepare yourself.’ I didn't die, but I was put in a coma. Kind of softened the blow a little bit.”
Stranger Things will air its final season this year, the end to a decade-long sci-fi horror saga that’s been one of Netflix’s biggest hits. Sink didn’t find out how Stranger Things 5 will end until the last table read. “I had gotten a little piece of information about the final episode back when we were working on season four, but I didn't know if that had stuck or changed in any way. But it was all kind of revealed when we read the final script.” She can’t tease much under heavy spoiler threat, but does offer this: “There's always a lot of world building done, but I think in this season especially, they really push the limits of that and what audiences have seen so far. That kind of surprised me,” she adds, “how they really opened everything up.”
Sink will soon star in another spoiler-concerned, fandom-centric project, when she takes on an unannounced role alongside Tom Holland in Spider-Man 4. A reported casting call refers to her character as “sharp and free-spirited with a mysterious past.” Entry into the Marvel Cinematic Universe will surely come with new pressures, but she’s had a good amount of preparation for this moment.
For now, Sink is enjoying the work of putting a play together, being part of something larger than herself — and part of a theater renaissance for young people that includes productions like Romeo & Juliet, The Outsiders, and All Nighter. She’s prioritizing her family and a few close friends, living her life in New York City, enjoying the first home she’s bought for herself, her art, and the outlet and community it provides. “I have no greater intentions beyond that,” she says. “Honestly.”
Perhaps it was Stranger Things that taught her the importance of building that life for herself, with people who care about her; a show that shaped her teenage years, bringing her friendship and a career. When she thinks about the series as a whole, across four seasons of playing Max, she gets flashes of night shoots, cold Atlanta air at 3 a.m., the Starcourt Mall, the “really nasty” school trailer where the cast studied, the rush of giddy all-nighters and being kids together.
“It was easy to forget how much these people really knew me and saw me. We speak the same language,” Sink says. “But in this last season I really came to terms with that. That's why it was so emotional, but also so beautiful, knowing that now it's up to us — that responsibility is on us to [sustain] the friendship. It was really nice to have that reckoning. Like, ‘I don't have to explain anything to you guys. You just get it. You know who I am.’”
Sink says she’s always had a strong sense of who she is — trouble came when she denied it or tried to contort herself into a different shape. She has a quiet kind of warmth to her; she speaks softly, thoughtfully. She is not the kind of actor who uses her platform in big, loud ways. She’s really not on social media at all. She is not fighting to be heard. She does not often process aloud when it comes to the art she’s making, but you can see her mind whirring.
It used to make her insecure, this instinct toward interiority. “Now I'm kind of at this place where it's like, it's fine. If I have something to say, I'll say it.” Meaning that, when it comes to the public, she isn’t necessarily worried about people misunderstanding her or thinking her personality is that of a character she plays. In fact, she’d prefer that — it helps keep the monster at bay. Think of her as O’Dessa, waking up a passive world with her voice, or as Shelby, going against her community to be true to her experiences. Or as Max, a heroine who can save herself, with a little help from her friends.
“It's better to get lost in a character,” Sink says. “I think the more private I am, also, the more believable the roles can be. I don't want anyone to know anything about me in my personal life, or know too much about who I am just as Sadie, because I think the louder that gets, the quieter the impact of your characters can be.” She pauses. “At least that's my theory, so I'm rolling with that.”
Production Credits
Photographer Beth Garrabrant
First Assistant Grayson Gunner
Second Assistant Abby Curtis
Stylist Ali Claire Marino
Stylist Assistant Malu Registre
Tailor Hailey Desjardins
Prop Stylist Maisie Sattler
Prop Stylist Assistant Jasmine Mcgill
Retoucher Digital Area
Hair Stylist Tommy Buckett using AZ Haircare
Makeup Artist Mollie Gloss
Makeup Assistant Emme George
Manicurist Julie Kandalec
Producer Caroline Santee Hughes
Production Coordinator Madison Moon
Production Assistant Elise Snider
Art and Design Director Emily Zirimis
Designer Liz Coulbourn
Associate Visuals Editor Bea Oyster
Senior Fashion Editor Tchesmeni Leonard
Assoc. Fashion Editor Samantha Gasmer
Editorial Credits
Editor-in-Chief Versha Sharma
Executive Editor Dani Kwateng
Features Director Brittney McNamara
Assoc. Entertainment Director Eugene Shevertalov
Assoc. Culture Director P. Claire Dodson
Culture Editor Kaitlyn McNab
Style Director Alyssa Hardy
Associate Director of Audience Development and Analytics Mandy Velez Tatti
Sr. Social Media Manager Honestine Fraser
Social Media Manager Jennifer Nguyen
Copy Editor Dawn Rebecky
Research Editor Cris Sada
Video Ali Farooqui
