Sadie attended Variety’s 2024 Power Of Young Hollywood yesterday. Click on the gallery link below to see all new photos.

And here’s also a new article/interview and photoshoot that was posted on the Variety website:

Sadie Sink Found Her Voice Thanks to ‘Stranger Things’ and Taylor Swift — Now She’s Ready to Conquer Her Greatest Fear

When Sadie Sink was 11 years old, she started having panic attacks. After acting professionally for three years, she was starring in a Broadway revival of “Annie,” which she’d been loving. “And then it just flipped,” she says. “Singing became the worst thing ever. I was terrified by it.”

Turns out, the unyielding pressure of a Broadway show had Sink convinced that a single wrong note or flubbed line — anything less than absolute perfection — meant the show was ruined. “I didn’t want to sing ever again.”

So she gave it up.

Two years later, Sink was back on Broadway, in the Peter Morgan drama “The Audience” as a young Queen Elizabeth II opposite Helen Mirren. The part did not involve singing, but on the first night of previews, Sink felt the old panic bubbling up. She didn’t want to go out on the stage.

“But then I told myself, ‘Sadie, if you don’t do this, what else do you have?’ The anxiety had already taken singing from me. If acting was gone, then it’s just all gone.”

That night was the first time she pushed through the panic.

Sink, now 22, has spent her career playing characters who also confront, often quite literally, the source of their dread — characters like the headstrong Max on “Stranger Things” to the antisocial Ellie in “The Whale” to the wide-eyed young heroine of Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well: The Short Film.” Her ability to effortlessly conjure the darker and more difficult emotional complexities of adolescence is uncanny.

“She has always felt very raw and real and unlike most actors in terms of how she shows her vulnerabilities,” says Matt Duffer, who created and executive produces “Stranger Things” with his brother, Ross. “There are some actors who hit a few notes really, really well, but they kind of hit just those notes. Sadie is increasingly able to hit these very subtle, nuanced notes. That’s pretty rare.”

Sink joined “Stranger Things” in Season 2, when she was 14, but her character really blew up in Season 4, after the series’ main villain targets Max for a gruesome death that the rest of the cast spends all season trying to prevent. They succeed, but only just: Max is left blind and in a coma. It’s a stunning, heartbreaking character arc that captivated audiences worldwide, so much so that Kate Bush’s ’80s hit “Running Up That Hill,” which Max plays on repeat before she’s felled, became the song of the summer of 2022.

Seated in a sunny café near her home in Atlanta, where she’s been filming the final season of “Stranger Things,” Sink says she had no idea audiences would have so much love for Max. “I really didn’t think people would care all that much about her journey,” she says with a good-natured shrug. Sink doesn’t have social media on her phone, so one of her older brothers had to show her how much Max was dominating his TikTok feed to convince her that people, did, in fact, care. “Still, I was kind of like, ‘That’s cool,’” she says.

She still hasn’t really absorbed just how massive an impact Max made. “I think I’m definitely numb to a lot of things now, which is a good thing. I think it keeps you stable.” In contrast to the tempestuous roles she often plays, Sink’s default expression is an amiable smile. She can be charming and engaging, and in conversation, she listens with a self-assured stillness. Unlike many young performers, she doesn’t project a need to be liked.

That hasn’t always been the case. As a child actor, she got accustomed to adults treating her “like a puppet,” telling her how to move her face and body in the most minute terms. “Whereas when you’re an adult, it becomes more of a discussion,” she says.

That transition began in earnest for Sink when she joined the cast of “The Whale,” the 2022 indie film that won Brendan Fraser an Oscar for his performance as a 600-pound gay man desperate to reconnect with his estranged daughter. Sink, 18 at the time, was drawn to the challenge of summoning the vindictive rage her character feels towards her father while still maintaining some amount of compassion for her character. But at first, Sink slipped back into people-pleasing, anxious that she wasn’t fulfilling the vision of the film’s director, Darren Aronofsky.

Instead, Aronofsky engaged Sink as an equal, encouraging her to focus on what she could bring to the role rather than trying to figure out how to please him. “It was very clear to me that she was an artist, that she cared about the work,” Aronofsky says. “I’ve got to credit Sadie with a lot of it. I don’t really remember having to spell out that much to her. I think she really got it off the page.”

Sink says that the experience of making “The Whale” “kind of changed everything for me.” But how that change is manifesting in her life is only now becoming clear to her. When she’s asked about where she accessed the raw anger that fuels so many of her characters, her eyes jump around as she answers, as if she’s working it out for herself in real time.

“I had this wall up before,” she says, twirling her braided pigtails around her fingers. “In my everyday life, I really suppress most emotions. Weirdly, when I’m acting, that’s when any anger or sadness that I have can just explode. That’s its moment.”

Just a few months after shooting “The Whale,” Sink had a chance to put her newfound sense of creative liberation to the test, when Taylor Swift cast her in “All Too Well” as, essentially, a 20-year-old Swift when she was dating Jake Gyllenhaal.

“At that point, I had never been in love,” Sink says. “I had never been through a breakup that intense. It was all foreign territory for me. I had to rely on just my years of research as a Swiftie.”

And yet, like so many Swift fans, Sink wound up connecting to herself in a profound way. For the scene, set to Swift’s most iconic lyric from the song — “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise” — Sink is curled up on her bed sobbing while her phone lights up nearby.

As an actor, she’d always focused on her character’s circumstances rather than her own experiences to find the emotion in the scene. “But as I was going, things from my personal life kind of came forward, which fueled it even more,” she says. “Then I was like, ‘Whoa. Maybe I should do some work on Sadie in these areas.’”

She doesn’t elaborate, except to say that she’s dropped “All Too Well” from her “wind down song” rotation while making “Stranger Things.” “It holds this incredibly nostalgic feeling for me now that I feel physically in my body,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself. “It’s too intense.”

Shooting Season 5 of “Stranger Things” has been its own exercise in nostalgia. The cast has been living in the same Atlanta neighborhood so they can better hang out with each other in off-hours to soak up their final months together. What Sink is doing in those months, meanwhile, has been a source of great interest for fans of the show. When asked whether the fact that Sink is still shooting is proof that Max makes it out of the coma, Sink offers a single, cryptic clue. “They love having me run,” she says. Whether that means in real life, the Upside Down or the Void is left, for now, to the imagination. “That’s all I’ll say,” she says.

The Duffer Brothers are similarly circumspect when pressed about Sink’s participation in Season 5. “She’s going to play a part in the season,” says Matt Duffer.

“But we don’t want to reveal how that’s possible,” Ross Duffer adds.

“Right, because she’s in a coma,” Matt says. But while praising Sink’s acting chops, Matt does divulge his own tantalizing hint at what’s to come. “I think she’s grown just more confident as an actor and in her choices,” he says. “We did film a scene the other day with her that was just absolutely heartbreaking. I don’t know how she hits those notes.”

Sink likens growing up on “Stranger Things” to “the best training in the world,” but she also affectionately compares the show to “a machine.” The elaborate production and sprawling cast mean Sink has a great deal of downtime punctuated by periods on set that can be bracingly intense. “I’ve been working all of last week, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I forgot how hard this show is,’” she says with a laugh. “You’re a team player here. It’s not about me. It’s not about anyone. It’s about the show and what’s best for it.”

As fulfilling as playing Max has been for Sink, she understands enough about herself now to know that she’s not keen to join another Hollywood machine any time soon. “I don’t want to play a superhero or a princess,” she says. “I just want to make sure everything that I’m doing is different than the last. I’m still young, and I’m still learning.”

She’s even ready to push past her profound fear of singing in front of anyone other than her closest friends and family. In early 2023, she signed up to play the title role in Searchlight’s 2025 feature “O’Dessa,” an ambitious indie from writer-director Geremy Jasper (“Patti Cake$”) about a farm girl who leaves home for a postapocalyptic metropolis to find a family heirloom. Most crucially for Sink, it’s also a rock opera — which means she had to sing professionally, almost every day, for the first time since she was 11.

“There was this moment where I was just like, ‘Oh my God. I can’t believe I said yes to this. Fuck. What am I doing?!’” she says, her eyes going so wide, it’s clear she’s still shocked she did it.

At first, singing in front of strangers was indeed still excruciating. “I would sing a song, and no one else would really know that I’m freaking out on the inside, but in my own head, it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s not my voice. That’s not how I can sing this song,’” she says.

But eventually that inner monologue began to fade. “Not always,” Sink is quick to say. “There were some days where it was harder than others. But sometimes, it was like, ‘I feel completely fearless right now, and I’m singing in front of a lot of people!’”

The trick? “She was singing; it wasn’t me,” she says about her character. As long as she was playing a part, she didn’t need to be perfect. “That, I feel comfortable with. But Sadie is not going to be singing anytime soon.”

Source: Variety.com