“It feels like flying!” Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe talk child stardom, passion, and the violent drive of Romeo and Juliet | stage

nOh Jobe and Sadie Sink compare their resumes. “Noah definitely has more Shakespeare experience than I do,” Sink says. “Oh, yeah, I guess so,” Gopi replies. “How many lines?” asks Sink. “A fair number actually,” he says. “More than 10!”

If Jobe wanted to go on a limb, he could honestly say that he played Hamlet when he was only 19 years old. It was two summers ago, when he stood on stage in a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theater and asked “To be or not to be?” In Chloé Zhao’s Oscar-nominated adaptation of Hamnet.

But playing Hamlet, he admits, was by no means based on experience: “Unfortunately, until now, Shakespeare wasn’t really something I was interested in.” He never participated in plays at school. “She was taught in this way that was so boring and intellectual that it went in one ear and out the other. She found no passion for it.”

And yet here he is, at the end of a day of rehearsals for Romeo and Juliet, sitting next to famed theater director Robert Icke. He’s not the only one who was surprised by the turn of events. Cink — the 23-year-old best known as Max Mayfield in Stranger Things, a role that brought her international fame — began by saying she never saw herself performing Shakespeare. Then she stops and clarifies: No, certainly, early like this. But her first meeting with Ike convinced her: “I had this gut feeling. ‘I’m doing this, and I’m doing it now.'”

Ike remembers the conversation. “I said, ‘Look, one of the things you can do now that will elude you in five years is the role of Juliet. It’s an amazing role, and very few people get to play it, because you have to play it at a young age for it to have any meaning.'” As for Ike’s motivation: Well, he and the play have unfinished business.

His 2012 production – only his second as a professional director – was praised for the way it depicted the violent rush of teenage love. But “it’s not over yet,” reflects Eck. “It was produced on tour, with no money, and I was very young. With Shakespeare, you might always get a certain distance, and then once you complete it, you see the part you didn’t get to and think, ‘Ah, next time…'”

After meeting Cinque and Jop — whose films include A Quiet Place and Honey Boy — he felt it was the right time. The five weeks they spent training were an education, as they put it. “It was amazing to think about reading our chemistry,” says Sinek. “And obviously we’ve improved a lot since then.”

Playing Romeo in the West End will be Gopi’s first appearance on stage and he is boyishly excited about it. “In movies, we can never talk much,” he admits. “This is the marriage of your voice and the words that make your heart beat, and that’s something I’ve never really had experience with. But when you get it, when the two connect, you feel like you’re flying.”

Unlike Joby, Cinque grew up a theater geek, as her West End theater debut could hold little terror for someone who played Annie on Broadway when she was 10 years old. She was 14 years old when she started filming Stranger Things, and the work dominated her teenage life. Has she captured her identity as well? “Yes, you can’t stop it, and there’s no reason to. It’s always going to be a big part of my life and I’m so grateful for the time I had on that show — I think it was really protective of me in a lot of ways, because it was a constant environment.”

She and Job had never met before they were chosen. But they know each other’s work, and if there’s one thing they can bond over, it’s the shared experience of being child actors. Sink’s parents moved their family from Texas to New Jersey to be closer to New York City when she and her brother Mitchell began performing professionally; Gopi’s mother is an actress and writer and his father works in production. Their guidance has been invaluable in shaping his career, and now his 12-year-old brother is benefiting as well – Jacobi Jobe played the lead role in Hamnet.

“It’s hard to go through this world and come out of it loving being an actor, so it’s very rare to work with someone your age in a similar situation,” says Jobe. Sink agrees. “When I was about 18, my mindset changed a little bit. I’m still passionate about acting, but I also think it means something different than I thought it meant. So anything before that feels like a separate chapter.”

She marked her transition with her first stage appearance since the age of thirteen, in John Proctor Is the Villain, a Kimberly Belflower High School film called The Crucible. A new play with an ensemble cast was “the perfect thing to come back with,” says Sinek; It ran for five months on Broadway and by the end, Cinque was determined to devote more time to the theater. John Proctor Is the Villain moves to London’s Royal Court Theater this month, opening two days after Romeo and Juliet. Sink has been suspended as executive producer of the film version currently in development.

But the idea of ​​playing Juliet raised one question. “I wrote it as really, really young, and I was like, does this seem too far away? Like, have I grown too old?” Cinque’s maturity is often commented upon—today, she is the most contained of the three, holding her own and quietly watching as Gopi discusses love, luxury, and the pitfalls of Gen Z dating.

“We live in a world full of dating apps and social media, where even if you find this girl beautiful, there is someone all over the world in Brazil who is much better,” he says. “It’s really beautiful to explore a relationship like the one in Romeo and Juliet and give yourself hope that something like this exists in the world.”

“I mean they both die in the end,” Sink looked at him skeptically.

“Yeah, but acting on that spark when you feel it, I don’t think we do that these days. Even if you think you’ve found what you’re looking for, you immediately doubt yourself.

It’s an interesting observation, especially since Icke’s 2012 production emphasized the nature of chance and serendipity in the play, even incorporating Sliding Doors moments. “A lot of people want it to be a play about the Montagues versus the Capulets, and actually, it’s not,” says Icke. “Because if Romeo shows up at the tomb in five minutes, he’ll find Juliet awake and they’ll be fine.”

“In all other tragedies,” he points out, “the bad thing has already happened before the play begins and hangs over it like a cloud—Hamlet’s father is dead, and King Lear’s mind is reeling. This play is different. It could just as easily be a comedy.”

Telling the world’s most famous love story as if we don’t all know the ending is one trick, but by bringing two young stars to the screen with so much excitement around them, Icke hopes to pull off another kind of coup. Jobe’s appearance at the awards show with Jacoby this month was just the beginning: he’ll soon be starring in major films alongside Hugh Jackman and Benedict Cumberbatch, as well as playing the lead role in a TV movie adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ novel Ingleby.

As for Cineke, her top-secret role in the Spider-Man and Avengers films — which she began filming on the streets of Glasgow and London last year — continues to send Marvel fans into a frenzy of speculation.

Ike is well aware of how much has changed since his 2012 production, including for him personally. “I was 25 when we last did it, and this time I’m a parent, so I’m more empathetic than I was when I was the parent in this play,” he says. What does he learn from his young company? “I’m learning a lot of words.” “I learned the meaning of the word ‘hard,’” Jobe says. “I was like, ‘Is this good?’” “It’s really good,” smiles Ike.

Ike admits that this is a “different world” than when he was 20. “But the young audience who comes to see these guys – and they may not know theater – will be completely amazed and amazed if we do it right.”