If you can tell an actor is acting when you watch them on the screen then they’re probably not doing a great job. But if you couldn’t discern that Stranger Things star Sadie Sink had never really been in love despite certainly acting like it in Taylor Swift‘s All Too Well: The Short Film, then that’s because Sink did some deep-dive research to get into character as her half of the dysfunctional, age-gap relationship with actor Dylan O’Brien.
“At that point, I had never been in love,” Sink told Variety magazine about getting cast in the video as, basically, a stand-in for a 20-year-old Swift when she was dating actor Jake Gyllenhaal, then 29. “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.”
Sink said she connected to herself in a profound way — like many Swifties — through the singer’s confessional lyrics, especially the song’s biting kiss-off line, “And you call me up again just to break me like a promise.” In the break-up scene, as that lyric unfolds, Sink is shown curled in a ball on her bed weeping as her phone lights up in the nearly 15-minute mini-movie written and directed by Swift.
“As I was going, things from my personal life kind of came forward, which fueled it even more,” she said of the tricky actor’s task of trying to focus on what’s going on with their character rather than tapping into their own life experiences to find the right emotional tone for a scene. “Then I was like, ‘Whoa. Maybe I should do some work on Sadie in these areas.’”
While the now-22-year-old star didn’t go into detail on what that work entailed, she did note that she’s since cut “All Too Well” from her “wind-down song” playlist while working on the anticipated upcoming fifth and final season of Stranger Things. “It holds this incredibly nostalgic feeling for me now that I feel physically in my body,” she said as she wrapped her arms around herself. “It’s too intense.”
Sink talked about getting cast in the short film in Jan. 2023 with Seth Meyers, calling the process “bizarre.” The actress said she was already a fan when Swift’s team reached out to say the singer had her in mind for the role. “You would never think that our paths would really cross, someone being in the music industry and then in the film industry,” Sink said of the “trippiest” offer she’s had to date. “It was like two different worlds. It was kind of a bizarre mashup, but everyone was very excited.”
Watch All Too Well: The Short Film below.
