Hollywood actress Sadie Sink has revealed that she had to “pretend (she) knew” what she was doing on the set of her first movie.
The ‘Stranger Things’ star had a solid background in theatre as a child. However, when she made her film debut in 2016 at the age of 14 in the sports drama Chuck alongside Naomi Watts, Sadie felt completely out of her depth.
In an interview with Elle magazine, she shared, “The training I had done at that point was just for theatre; I’d never taken a class on acting for the screen.”
She added, “So the terms they were using, like when they’d say, ‘Rolling’. I was like, What does that mean? Everything was just so foreign, and nobody explained it to me so I just had to pretend like I knew what I was doing.”
Despite her “limited” experience in front of the camera, she mentioned that when the role of Max Mayfield in Stranger Things came up, it just “felt right.”
“I had very limited experience in film, but then ‘Stranger Things’ came along and it just felt right. It was the biggest thing I’d ever auditioned for but I just had this feeling like, This is going to happen,” she said.
At 23, Sadie expressed gratitude to her and her castmates for being given opportunities to work on other projects between seasons of Stranger Things. She feels these experiences helped enhance her performance as Max.
“It was so important [they let us do that] because anything I did outside of Stranger Things was helping me grow as an actor, and then I’d return to the next season and have a new skill set. There was a certain year when it took a turn and I felt like, Oh, I can play characters outside of this genre, and it opened up my world and got me excited about different opportunities (after the show ends),” she explained.
Even though she spent time away from portraying Max, Sadie found it surprisingly easy to step back into the character.