NC Sadie Sink stars as Max in Stranger Things

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The ballroom at the Jane Hotel in Manhattan’s West Village feels haunted. With faded velvet sofas and a stuffed animal or two,it’s the kind of room in which the eyes of the portraits seem to follow you around. Despite the room being bathed in late-afternoon sunshine, actress Sadie Sink gives a little shiver. “I’m getting some creepy vibes right now,” she says, casting her gaze over her shoulder. “But I just don’t want to believe in ghosts, ghouls and spirits.”

Having landed a major role in the second series of Netflix sci-fi hit Stranger Things, interacting with energies from “the other side” is all in a day’s work for the teenager. Sadie, who is from Houston in Texas, remembers receiving the phone call telling her she’d got the part. “I couldn’t really process what was going on. I was just frozen because I knew life wasn’t really going to be the same any more,” the 15 year old says. She was aware that mega fame – what her co-star Gaten Matarazzo terms the F-word – lay just around the corner. And sure enough, as soon as it was announced she had joined the cast, she gained thousands of new instagram followers.

I just don’t want to believe in ghosts, ghouls and spirits Sadie Sink

The current count stands at 168,000. “I started feeling pressure to post something but my phone is pretty much out of battery most of the time – or lost,” she confesses. “I see some kids whose social media is their whole world and I actually think it’s good to disconnect from that.” So far so unaffected by her brush with the F-word and the young actress seems the antithesis of the theatre-school brat. As softly spoken as she is courteous, her freckled face is devoid of make-up and her rosebud mouth is arranged in a permanent Mona-Lisa smile. On the day we meet she is chaperoned by older brother Spencer, one of her four siblings. The family moved to New York after Sadie and another brother, Mitchell, landed roles on Broadway. “We said we’ll stay until the end of the run but then we both kept getting jobs,” she says. “My dad’s a teacher and a football coach and he found a job in New Jersey.”

PH Sadie remains tight-lipped about the plot about the forthcoming series

Having attended a performing arts school in Houston, Sadie’s Broadway debut came in a 2012 production of Annie. “I’d already done so many productions of that show. I just feel like I was the right age and had the right colour hair,” says Sadie, who joined as the “swing”, a multitasking understudy for several roles. “I had to memorise every single part, every dance move, every line, every harmony,” she recalls. After eight months of sitting backstage on standby she was eventually cast as the lead and found herself performing onstage every night. She was already a fan of Stranger Things by the time her audition came along and had binge-watched the first series. “Everybody had been watching it,” she explains. “I also knew Caleb (McLaughlin) and Gaten because we all did Broadway at the same time.” The show, with its nostalgic references to 80s pop culture, is popular with thirty- and forty-somethings, while also appealing to Sadie’s generation.

American TV series Stranger Things Mon, September 12, 2016 American supernatural horror series Stranger Things is is set in 1983 Indiana, when a young boy vanished into thin air. It pays homage to the classic 80's genre. Play slideshow Netflix 1 of 18 On November 6, 1983 in the made up town of Hawkins, Indiana, 12-year-old Will Byers vanishes mysteriously

“There’s no other show where the kids are the focus and the action takes place through their eyes,”she says. In the first series a young boy disappeared among a series of supernatural events in the fictional Indiana town of Hawkins. The second series is set a year later and sees the characters trying to return to normal as they try to deal with the fallout. And if series one, with its monsters and suspense, kept viewers on the edge of their seats, the fear factor is really ramped up in the next series. Sadie remains tight-lipped about the plot, but reveals that her character, Max, and stepbrother, Billy, have only recently moved to Hawkins from California. Something of a tomboy, she hangs out with the guys and doesn’t wear dresses. And she skateboards. Did the actress have to learn how to? “I had lessons in New Jersey before we started filming. I had a month to master it. I can’t do anything fancy but I think I pulled it off. It’s a nice skill to have I guess.” Describing the atmosphere on the Atlanta set in Georgia as being like one big family with the cast staying in touch through group texts, she and her school-age co-stars also had to log three hours of study for each day of filming.

NC Stranger Things returns to Netflix on October 27