Sadie Sink—the now 23-year-old actress whose star took off when she joined the ensemble cast of Netflix’s Stranger Things during its second season—has not quite lived in a right-side-up world since 2017.
“There’s life during Stranger Things and there’s going to be life after Stranger Things. It was my childhood. Things are going to be very different,” she says with a bittersweet smile, speaking to me over Zoom from her parents’ home in New Jersey.
The show’s grand finale arrives on New Year’s Eve, wrapping up a run that’s seen Sink and her co-stars—including Noah Schnapp, Caleb McLaughlin, Gaten Matarazzo, and Millie Bobby Brown—go from unknown teenagers to globally famous young adults. “None of this has been a normal way to grow up, but what made it manageable was that we were all going through it together,” she continues. “Having people who understood it without needing to explain it—that’s invaluable.”
Stranger Things is Netflix’s biggest franchise: a record-breaking, nine-and-a-half-year phenomenon about a ragtag group of kids in the Midwestern suburbs, battling forces both unexplainable and somehow relatable in the 1980s. (Anyone who grew up before the internet may recall finding—and fighting—their own childhood monsters in the woods.) Created by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, the juggernaut has generated billions of dollars in peripheral income from its merch and pop-up theme parks; hooked legions of fans across generations; and tapped into a vein of nostalgia that feels especially poignant—and gripping—in our hyper-digitized world.
As the introverted Max Mayfield, Sink’s cool, sensitive performance has made her a fan favorite: So powerful was her arc and presence in Season 4 that the 1985 Kate Bush song “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)”—which functions as a kind of aural MacGuffin in Max’s story—reentered the 2022 pop charts.
“Any time young girls see themselves in Max… it’s something special,” Sink says. “I’ve met kids who have said something as small as, ‘I took up skateboarding because of her,’ to as big as, ‘I felt seen because of her.’ My mom is a teacher, and she told me that a student from another class, a nine-year-old kid, wrote that if she could meet any actress, it would be me. That kind of thing never stops feeling surreal. It’s a reminder of how many people the show reaches, especially young viewers. I’m proud to be part of something that celebrates misfit kids who are different, but who are still heroes.”
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