Credit: Freestyle Digital Media

Who’d have thought that a theatre-obsessed girl from Brenham, Texas, who started chasing the stage before she became a teenager, would end up joining the MCU as Jean Grey, one of Marvel’s most famous and complex characters? Yet when you look at Sadie Sink, you realise perhaps the bigger surprise is that it took this long.

Most of us met her as Max Mayfield in Stranger Things, the gingerhead with a skateboard. She was a season late to the show but became the life of the latter ones. But people forget that before Vecna’s strangling and Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’, Sink had already led Annie on Broadway and appeared alongside Helen Mirren in The Audience. Not too shabby, eh?

Then came another Broadway classic in 2025: John Proctor Is the Villain, and if anyone still thought Sink needed monsters to grab attention, that notion went straight out the window, because her performance as Shelby Holcomb earned her a Tony nomination for ‘Best Actress in a Play’.

And now? An X-Men future and The Marriage Plot are all in the picture, so yes, things are getting rather exciting, and what better moment to rummage through the films that brought her here?

Five must-watch Sadie Sink movies after Spider-Man:

Eli (Ciarán Foy, 2019)

Before Sadie Sink started carrying entire films on her shoulders, she popped up in Eli as Haley, a mysterious girl. The titular Eli has a rare condition that makes contact with the outside world dangerous, but the remote clinic he is in is not the safe haven he expects.

He starts seeing ghosts, while the treatment itself becomes frightening. Enter Haley, who keeps appearing outside the isolated medical facility and tells him that other children were treated there before him and never returned home.

Sink had already broken through as Max in Stranger Things, and although Eli gives her a much smaller part to play, it matters. She encourages Eli to distrust the clinic and helps push him towards the truth about his treatment. By the time the film explains why she knows so much, her appearances make a lot more sense. There’s more to her than what meets the eye, quite literally in this case.

The Fear Street Trilogy (Leigh Janiak, 2021)

Sadie Sink in all three Fear Street films? Oh, hell yeah! Part One: 1994 introduces Shadyside, a town with a long history of murderous rampages, and Sink plays Ziggy Berman before Part Two: 1978 gives her the bigger role. That film takes us back to Camp Nightwing, where Ziggy is having a miserable summer when one of the counsellors starts killing people with an axe. As if camp was not bad enough!

Then Part Three: 1666 takes the story back to the origins of the curse, with Sink appearing as Constance before the film returns to Ziggy in 1994.

The actor was not much of a slasher fan before filming, so director Leigh Janiak had her watch Friday the 13th and Scream. Still, Ziggy suits her because she has a hard edge and spends much of the film being underestimated. But can you blame her for pushing back?

The Whale (Darren Aronofsky, 2022)

By the time The Whale reached people, Sadie Sink had moved well past the point of being ‘the girl from Stranger Things‘. She plays Ellie, the estranged daughter of Charlie, a reclusive English teacher whose health is failing as he tries to reconnect with her.

Ellie is furious with him for leaving the family, and Sink does not sand down any of that anger. She was cruel and exhausting, and you may not like her, but that’s kind of the point. Sink has spoken about trying to understand whether Ellie was genuinely awful or just carrying years of pain with nowhere to put it, and that is what stops the role from becoming one long teenage stereotype.

There is also a lovely bit of family trivia in The Whale: Sink’s younger sister Jacey plays Ellie as a child. Better still, Sink has admitted she did not really know who Brendan Fraser was when they first met. Imagine turning up to work opposite the lead from The Mummy and being unfazed; that’s Miss Sink for you.

Dear Zoe (Gren Wells, 2022)

Sadie Sink was only 17 when she filmed Dear Zoe, and this was her first lead role in a feature, so naturally, she chose a fun role for a teenager, which had her grieving over a dead sister! Guess she never liked playing it easy.

She plays Tess DeNunzio, a teenager whose younger sister Zoe is killed in a car accident on 9/11 while Tess is meant to be watching her, which leads her to carry the blame for it all. She begins writing letters to Zoe and, unable to cope at home, moves in with her biological father, Nick, while trying to make some sense of what happened.

You can imagine the burden she had on her shoulders, because Tess spends much of the film stuck between mourning Zoe and trying to live like a normal teenager again. Dear Zoe was filmed in 2019, before Fear Street, The Whale and the later Stranger Things episodes showed just how much dramatic weight Sink could handle. Looking back now, you can see the writing on the wall.

A Sacrifice (Jordan Scott, 2024)

Sadie Sink heads to Berlin for A Sacrifice, and for once, the problem is not a monster waiting around the corner but a family relationship that has gone completely shambles. She plays Mazzy, a teenager sent to stay with her estranged father, Ben, who has built a career studying cults and the people who fall into them.

Mazzy, meanwhile, is lonely in a city she does not know, which is when Martin enters the picture and introduces her to a group that seems warm and welcoming at first. You can probably see where this is going, can’t you?

Ben is investigating a mass suicide linked to a cult, yet he misses what is happening under his own nose. Sink said she was interested in how easily the promise of belonging can pull people in and even linked that idea to fandom and social media, and suddenly, Mazzy’s choices make a lot more sense.