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Noah Jupe and Sadie Sink are comparing their CVs. “Noah has more Shakespeare experience than me, for sure,” says Sink. “Oh yes, I think so,” replies Jupe. “How many lines?” asks Sink. “Quite a few, actually,” he reports. “More than 10!”
If Jupe wanted to flex, he could say in all truth that he played Hamlet when he was only 19. That was two summers ago, when he stood on the stage in a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe theatre and asked “To be or not to be?” in Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-nominated adaptation of Hamnet.
But playing an actor playing Hamlet was, he admits, in no way based on experience: “Sadly, until now, Shakespeare wasn’t really something I was interested in.” He never got on with the plays at school. “It was taught in this way that was so boring and intellectual that it just went in one ear and out the other. You didn’t find any passion for it.”
And yet here he is, at the end of a day’s rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet, sitting alongside the acclaimed theatre director Robert Icke. He’s not the only one surprised by the turn of events. Sink – who is 23 and better known as Max Mayfield in Stranger Things, a role that has brought her global fame – begins to say she never saw herself doing Shakespeare. Then she stops and clarifies: never, certainly, as early as this. But her first meeting with Icke convinced her: “I just had this gut feeling. ‘I do this, and I do it right now.’”
Icke remembers the conversation. “I said, ‘Look, one of the things that you could do now that will escape you in five years is Juliet. It’s an amazing part, and so few people get to play it, because you have to play it young for it to make any sense.’” As for Icke’s motivation: well, he and the play have unfinished business.
The production he mounted back in 2012 – only his second as a professional director – was praised for the way it captured the heady rush of teenage love. But “it just wasn’t finished” reflects Icke. “It was made on a tour, on no money, and I was really little. With Shakespeare you probably always get a certain distance and then just as you complete it you can see the bit that you didn’t get to and you think, ‘Ah, next time …’”
After meeting Sink and Jupe – whose films include A Quiet Place and Honey Boy – he sensed this was that time. Their five weeks of rehearsal have been, in their own words, an education. “It’s been cool thinking back to the chemistry read that we did. We’ve obviously grown so much since then,” says Sink.
Playing Romeo in the West End will be Jupe’s stage debut and he is boyishly enthusiastic about it. “In films we never get to speak that much,” he admits. “This is marrying your voice and the words to your heart and that’s something I’ve not really had experience of. But when you get it, when the two connect, it feels as if you’re flying.”
Unlike Jupe, Sink grew up as a self-described theatre nerd – a West End debut can hold few terrors for someone who played Annie on Broadway when she was 10. She was 14 when she started filming Stranger Things, and the work took over her teenage life. Did it take over her identity as well? “Yeah, you can’t stop it, and there’s no reason to really. It is always going to be a huge part of my life and I’m so grateful for my time on that show – I think it really protected me in a lot of ways, because it was such a constant environment.”
She and Jupe had never met before they were cast. But they knew each other’s work, and if there’s one thing they can bond over, it’s the shared experience of being a child actor. Sink’s parents moved their family from Texas to New Jersey to be closer to New York City when both she and her brother Mitchell began performing professionally; Jupe’s mother is an actor and writer and his father worked on the production side. Their guidance was invaluable in shaping his career and now his 12-year-old brother is also benefiting – Jacobi Jupe played the title role in Hamnet.
“It’s tough to go through that world and still come out of it loving being an actor,” says Jupe, “so it’s very rare when you get to work with someone around your age in a similar position.” Sink agrees. “When I was about 18 my mentality shifted a bit. I am still passionate about acting, but I also think it means something different than what I thought it meant. So anything before that just feels like a separate chapter.”
She marked her transition with her first stage appearance since she was 13, in John Proctor Is the Villain, Kimberly Belflower’s high-school take on The Crucible. A new play with an ensemble cast was, says Sink, “the perfect thing to return with”; it ran for five months on Broadway and by the end, Sink was determined to make more time for theatre. John Proctor Is the Villain transfers to the Royal Court theatre in London this month and opens a couple of days after Romeo and Juliet. Sink is down as an executive producer on the film version currently in development.
The thought of playing Juliet raised one question, however. “She’s written as really, really young, and I did wonder, does that feel too distant? Like, have I kind of grown up too much?” Sink’s maturity is often commented on – today, she is the most contained of the three, keeping her counsel and watching quietly as Jupe discusses love, limerence and the perils of gen Z dating.
“We live in a world of dating apps and social media where even if you find this girl pretty, there’s someone across the world in Brazil that’s, like, way better,” he says. “It’s really nice to explore a relationship like the one in Romeo and Juliet and give yourself hope that such a thing exists in the world.”
Sink gives him a sceptical look: “I mean, they both die in the end.”
“Yeah, but acting on that spark when you feel it, I just don’t think we do that nowadays. And even if you think you’ve found what you’re looking for, you immediately doubt yourself.”
It’s an interesting observation, especially as Icke’s 2012 production emphasised the nature of chance and coincidence in the play, even incorporating Sliding Doors moments. “So many people want it to be a play about Montagues v Capulets,” says Icke, “and actually, it isn’t. Because if Romeo were to turn up at the tomb five minutes later, he’d find Juliet awake and they’d be fine.
“In all of the other tragedies,” he points out, “the bad thing is already happening before the play starts and hangs over it like a cloud – Hamlet’s dad is dead, King Lear’s mind is wobbling. This one is different. It could so easily be a comedy.”
Telling the most famous love story in the world as if we don’t all know the ending is one trick, but in casting two young screen stars with plenty of heat around them Icke hopes to pull off another kind of coup. Jupe’s awards appearances with Jacobi this month were just the start: he is soon to star in major films alongside Hugh Jackman and Benedict Cumberbatch, as well playing the lead role in a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel Engleby.
As for Sink, her top-secret role in the Spider-Man and Avengers films – which she began shooting on the streets of Glasgow and London last year – continues to drive Marvel fans into a frenzy of speculation.
Icke is well aware of how much has changed since his 2012 production – including for him personally. “I was 25 when we did it last time,” he says, “and this time I’m a parent, so I’m more sympathetic than I was to what it’s like to be a parent in this play.” And what’s he learning from his young company? “I learn lots of words.” “You learned what ‘hard’ meant,” says Jupe. Icke grins: “I was, like, ‘Is that good?’” “It’s really good.”
It is, admits Icke, “a different universe” to the one when he was 20. “But a young audience who come to see these guys – and maybe don’t know theatre – will be completely astonished and blown away if we get it right.”
English (US) ·