Sadie Sink Has Revealed How Much of Taylor Swift’s ‘All Too Well’ Short Film Was Improvised

Stranger Things star Sadie Sink has worked with some major directors over the course of her career, but perhaps her most high-profile gig was acting for Taylor Swift in Swift’s sorta-directorial debut.

Prior to 2021’s All Too Well: The Short Film, Swift had taken the helm of her own music videos, but never a narrative piece like the story starring Sink and Dylan O’Brien as a toxic couple.

Now Sink is opening up about the process of making the short, including which parts were improvised. The fight scene in the kitchen, for one.

“What’s so cool and realistic about it is that in a fight, it’s not supposed to be completely well thought out. If you feel anger, your immediate response—if you can’t control it—is to start talking about what’s making you angry. It doesn’t have to be fully formed, coherent sentences. You may say the same thing over and over, but that’s real, and that’s natural. You don’t see a lot of natural dialogue in films,” Sink told Bustle in a new interview. “So for [Swift] to allow us the space to improvise and interact in a way that we would if we were actually having a fight with our partner, just really served the song and the story well.”

Sink revealed that she and O’Brien only did one take of the scene, describing it as “a crazy, fun acting game, and it happened to be in the final cut.”

And Swift doesn’t just direct on the fly, she casts on the fly too. Sink didn’t have to audition for the part and didn’t even meet Swift before getting the role.

“Looking back, I think she has some kind of Spidey sense where she’s just able to recognize someone who understands the assignment, because I knew that song so well and I knew the history behind it,” marveled Sink. “How she was able to see that without even meeting me beforehand, and just offering it to me right off the bat.… Well, she’s got good intuition.”