I got a little behind on the gallery so this is mainly TIFF and Sadie’s new modeling campaigns.












The actor talks Max’s future on the final season, and why her character and Elaine Benes have more in common than you might think.
After so many Stranger Things episodes centered on Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown), Max (Sadie Sink) finally got to take center stage in season 4. Reeling from the loss of her brother, the flame-haired skater retreats from her friends and cuts things off with her boyfriend, Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin). Her only companion is a Walkman—which has the cassette tape containing Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill.” She listens to the song so much that even though she’s kept her friends at bay, they know it’s the one song that could save her life—and, they hope, theirs. (Viewers have also been listening to it on repeat, to the point where, 37 years after its release, it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Global 200 chart several times following the Netflix series’ season 4 premiere.)
Stranger Things—which, as the costumes make clear, takes place in the ’80s—isn’t the only way Sink gets her nostalgia fix. The 20-year-old actor has also been revisiting Seinfeld. Here, she makes the case for her similarity to Max and reflects on her character’s past, present, and future.
What was your reaction to the news that the Duffer Brothers [who cocreated Stranger Things] originally planned for the season to end with Max dying?
I didn’t know until someone told me about the interviews. They never really tell us what’s going to happen until we get the scripts, and when I got the script for episode 9, it said that Max dies but that she sort of comes back. It’s uncertain, but she’s not fully dead. I didn’t know the plan was to completely kill me off, which definitely would’ve been a very impactful ending. They’ve been saying in interviews that Max’s state at the end of season 4 is intentional, crucial, and calculated in terms of how it’s going to come to play in season 5—I guess. I know nothing.
What did you think was going to happen to Max before you read the script?
Season 4 was a wild journey for her. I definitely knew nothing good would happen, but I was not expecting this—this was a crazy, crazy end. I thought either she was going to succeed in a really epic way, or it would be her downfall, and I guess we landed somewhere in the middle.
You had to pause filming the season for more than half a year during lockdown. How much did Max stick with you during that break?
I definitely needed that time because of the state Max is in in season 4. That sense of isolation she feels is something we could all relate to coming out of quarantine, so having a lot of time by myself was good. By the time we returned to season 4, we were all really hungry to get back to work, so there was this determination and excitement on set. It wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be to get back into the groove of filming after such a long break.
Thanks to “Stranger Things,” Sink spent most of her teen years in the spotlight. But underneath all the glitz and glam, she’s just your average 20-year-old who prefers baggy jeans to ball gowns.
Don’t get Sadie Sink started on High School Musical. “You just say the word and I can sing all the lyrics of ‘I Want It All’ from the third movie,” she laughs, describing her love of the iconic Disney Channel franchise and the characters Ryan and Sharpay Evans, played by Lucas Grabeel and Ashley Tisdale. “They are NOT the villains!” she passionately declares, only half joking. (For the uninitiated, she’s referring to the first film, in which the Evans siblings try to prevent Vanessa Hudgens’s Gabriella Montez and Zac Efron’s Troy Bolton from auditioning for the school musical.) “Sharpay put in the work! Where is the respect for seniority? But I could talk about this for hours.”
In fact, we’re only five minutes into our video chat, but here we are, already gossiping, grinning and giggling like two girls at a slumber party. She’s even dressed for one, wearing a relaxed striped shirt with a messy bun and barely-there makeup as she sits cross-legged on a chair in an L.A. hotel room. And maybe it’s her young age of 20, or maybe it’s because I’ve caught Sink in a lull after a whirlwind of press for season four of Stranger Things, but our conversation feels more intimate than most. This, I soon discover, is rare for the usually guarded actor.
Growing up in Brenham, Tex., Sadie Sink and her four siblings — three brothers and one sister — weren’t allowed to watch many movies, but one that they were able to enjoy was High School Musical (hence the obsession). “It really had a huge impact on me and started me and my brother Mitchell on our musical journey,” she shares. Case in point: The Sink siblings would make up their own choreography to various songs from the film and (in her words) force their family to watch them perform it. With two such fervent musical fans in the house, their parents enrolled both Sink and her brother in local singing, acting and dancing classes, which led them to get roles at a regional theatre in Houston. “My mom drove us to all these things — not in the hope of our ever going to Broadway or anything like that but because they were activities we loved doing.”
As luck would have it, that’s exactly what happened next. Sink was playing the titular role in a local production of Annie when she learned that Broadway was looking for its own red-headed protagonist. After submitting an audition tape, Sink was initially cast as an understudy, but a few months later, she became the star. She was 11 years old at the time. By 12, she was starring in The Audience (written by The Crown’s Peter Morgan) alongside Helen Mirren. “That’s when my relationship with acting changed,” notes Sink. “Working with some of the greatest minds in the industry taught me about what acting really is, and that’s when I decided this was what I wanted to do.”
With that in mind, Sadie Sink began a natural transition from stage to screen. After moving to New Jersey with her family, she landed a few guest spots on TV series like The Americans and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. But it wasn’t until she auditioned for season two of Stranger Things that her world completely changed. Although the casting directors were initially hesitant about Sink’s “old” age (she was 14 at the time!), she wouldn’t take no for an answer. “I just begged and pleaded with them to give me more material so I could show them something fresh,” she explains, describing how “right” the part of Max felt to her. The producers relented and called her in for a chemistry read with now co-stars Gaten Matarazzo and Caleb McLaughlin. The next day, she found out she’d got the part.
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When she’s not gracing the couture runways, befriending actor Woody Harrelson, or starring in the hit Netflix show Stranger Things, Sadie Sink spends her spare time doing nothing.
Well, not nothing. The 20-year-old reads (correction: is trying to read more). She plays with her five-month-old puppy. And, like many late adolescents, she peruses TikTok. During a recent scroll, Sink figured she’d fallen into some niche algorithmic vortex. Despite persistent swiping, clip after clip was soundtracked by the same song: “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God),” a 1985 British pop ballad that arms Sink’s character, Max Mayfield, against the supernatural.
It had to be a coincidence. Although there are many accounts that exist claiming to be Sink—some with tens of thousands of fans—the star’s legitimate profile is anonymous (in Zoomer slang: a “finsta”). TikTok couldn’t know it was really her behind the screen. Within the same week, the Kate Bush track would hit number one on iTunes—40 years after its release—thanks to the show.
“I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve had to listen to ‘Running Up That Hill,’” says Sink. “I knew the show had a giant fanbase, but I didn’t know how big until I was in it.”
The resurrection of “Running Up That Hill” has parallels to Sink’s ascension to stardom. As if portraying one of the most beloved characters on Netflix’s most-watched English-language series wasn’t enough, the Sink-led Stranger Things episode “Dear Billy” will make Emmy history if it wins in all seven categories it’s been submitted for. Winona Ryder identified Sink as the next Meryl Streep. Then, of course, there are her leagues of fans (an eye-watering 20 million on Instagram alone) obsessively ingesting any scrap of content she provides—from press appearances to behind-the-scenes insight.
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