The 2015 role that changed Sadie Sink’s life: “Taught me about what acting really is”
Stranger Things made a lot of child actors very famous very quickly, and one of them was Sadie Sink.
She joined the massively popular show in its second season as Max Mayfield, a tomboyish newcomer to the town who initially puts up walls, but is eventually worn down by the main gang of endearing nerds. Over the next three seasons, she became one of the most popular characters on the show. Max got a lot of great moments, most notably the scene from season four that reminded the world how good a song Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ is.
Since shooting to global stardom, Sink has translated that success into a career on the big screen, with her performance opposite Brendan Fraser in The Whale garnering much praise, as did her turn in Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy, and she is now set to appear in the upcoming Spider-Man: Brand New Day as a character that has been shrouded in secrecy, but Sink had initially established herself as a child star on the stage.
After her theatrical debut in an adaptation of the film White Christmas, she landed a gig as the understudy to the title character in Annie, eventually graduating to the star of the show and performing eight times a week for 18 months when she was still a pre-teen. It was during this period that she first started appearing on TV, turning up in shows like Blue Bloods and The Americans.
In 2015, two years prior to her arrival in Hawkins, Sink took on a new role in the Peter Morgan play, The Audience, starring Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, a role she also played in the 2006 movie, The Queen, which was also written by Morgan.
With the title taken from the weekly audience Elizabeth would hold with the country’s prime minister, the play is set throughout the reign of Britain’s longest-serving monarch, omitting just three of the prime ministers who had served up to that point (Harold Macmillan, Alec Douglas-Home, and Edward Heath), to track the modern history of the United Kingdom through the relationship between its elected leader and its unelected head of state.
Sink played a younger version of Elizabeth in the 2015 Broadway transfer of the show, a role she alternated with Elizabeth Teeter. Speaking to Fashion in 2022, she revealed that this was a proper watershed moment in her life.
“That’s when my relationship with acting changed,” she explained, “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.”
Despite ascending to the highest heights of film and television, Sink has not forgotten her theatre roots. A decade after she appeared in The Audience, she returned to Broadway to star in Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain, for which she was nominated for a Tony. In 2026, she made her West End debut in Robert Icke’s version of Romeo and Juliet, playing the famous doomed Capulet heiress.
