Taylor Swift and Sadie Sink ‘Screamed into Pillows’ to Prepare for Emotional ‘All Too Well’ Scenes
Stranger Things fans already know that Sadie Sink is an incredible actor capable of displaying intense emotion. In the “All Too Well” short film, Sink delivers a powerful performance as a young woman dealing with a tumultuous relationship. To prepare for one emotional moment in “All Too Well”, Taylor Swift and Sink screamed into pillows to get the correct expression down.
Taylor Swift wrote the screenplay for the ‘All Too Well’ short film with Sadie Sink in mind
Taylor Swift recently talked with director Martin McDonagh on Variety’s Directors on Directors series. The Midnights singer discussed the making of All Too Well: The Short Film, and how she came up with the concept. The short film stars Sink and Dylan O’Brien as a young couple dealing with the highs and lows of an ultimately failed relationship.
“I had seen Sadie in Stranger Things, and I thought she has such a presence, she has such an empathy to her,” Swift explained. “You could just see micro emotions flash across her face in a way that I just don’t usually see in performances. It’s rare. And I thought she’s never been a romantic lead, and I wondered if she’d be interested in playing a young woman who goes through her first, you know, catastrophic, cataclysmic heartbreak.”
Swift and Sink screamed into pillows to prepare for emotional bedroom moment
Sink and O’Brien have excellent chemistry throughout the short film, and Sink expertly portrays the devastation she feels after they break up. In one “All Too Well” scene, Sink is curled up on the bed and crying, completely red in the face. Taylor Swift shared that to get the right emotions for this scene, the two screamed into pillows. Sink also listened to a song that made her cry to create the necessary atmosphere.
“I had a few conversations with her about how she likes to work in those kind of intense, emotive scenes. I think she does a lot of prep work on her own, but she also had this song that she says always makes her cry, which is ‘Savior Complex’ by Phoebe Bridgers…We ended up playing that song on set, giving Sadie the room for a while…We wanted her to look like she’d been crying, and the kind of body heave of that. There was, like, screaming into pillows and stuff, and some of that we did together, and some of that was just her on her own, but we wanted to give her a lot of space in the room.”
Swift might not have made the short film if Sink didn’t do it
Speaking with TIFF Originals, Swift said that she knew O’Brien and Sink needed to be in the video or it might not have been the product she envisioned. She said the two actors were “what her heart needed” and she would have been skeptical about making the short film with other actors.
“I was writing it for Sadie,” Swift said. “And if she would have said ‘no,’ I just don’t know if I would have made the film.”
Fortunately, Swift said it didn’t take much convincing to get both actors to accept the roles.
