Sadie Sink’s breakout role came as Max on Stranger Things, but her fame reached new heights with the 2021 release of Taylor Swift’s All Too Well: The Short Film.
Sink, 22, starred alongside Dylan O’Brien in the video for Swift’s 10-minute opus. Three years later, the video has amassed 99 million views, but Sink admitted she was hesitant to watch herself in it.
Speaking to Bustle in a story published Wednesday, July 10, Sink recalled the fight scene in the film that occurs a couple minutes in. The music breaks after Swift sings, “And all I felt was shame / And you held my lifeless frame,” before the video cuts to Sink and O’Brien together in a kitchen. Nearly three minutes of dialogue occur between the two and, Sink says, it was entirely improvised.
She didn’t even expect Swift to keep the scene in the final cut.
“I was really scared to watch the video. When she told me she kept that scene, I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’” Sink recalled. “It was completely on the fly; I don’t remember anything I said; we only did one take.”
Not only was it unscripted, but Sink says she didn’t even know it was going to happen until they were ready to shoot.
“I remember they attached microphones to us, and I was like, ‘Why are they making us wear a mic?’” she added. “I thought they were just capturing our mouths moving and we were going to visualize a fight in the kitchen [with music playing over it]. I just went with whatever came up in the moment. It was a crazy, fun acting game, and it happened to be in the final cut.”
But Sink raised a solid point: When two people fight in real life, it’s often reactive, not thought out. Leaving the scene to a spur-of-the-moment exchange where the two could play off of each other’s reactions left the scene feeling organic and unscripted because it was.
“It doesn’t have to be fully formed, coherent sentences. You may say the same thing over and over, but that’s real, and that’s natural,” Sink explained. “You don’t see a lot of natural dialogue in films. So for her to allow us the space to improvise and interact in a way that we would if we were actually having a fight with our partner, just really served the song and the story well.”
It came from a level of trust that Swift had in Sink. Looking back, Sink admitted she was “confused” when Swift asked her to play the role, but Swift has said that if the actress turned her down, they would not have made the video at all.
“I think she has some kind of Spidey sense where she’s just able to recognize someone who understands the assignment, because I knew that song so well and I knew the history behind it,” Sink said.
