EXCLUSIVE: Stranger Things star Sadie Sink will make her London stage bow as Juliet in a production of Romeo & Juliet that hot director Robert Icke will helm in March, Deadline can reveal.
But soft — who is her Romeo? Icke and producer James Bierman have picked Noah Jupe (A Quiet Place, Le Mans ‘66) to play the love-hungry teen besotted with Juliet.
Gotta say, they appear just right as the star-crossed lovers.
Jupe, who plays Hamlet in Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet movie that opens this month, will be making his professional theater debut. The actor also appears with Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Colman in the forthcoming second season of BBC drama The Night Manager.
Sink, who plays Max Mayfield in Stranger Things, is a creature of the theater, having played in the musical Annie on Broadway when she was just 10 years of age. A year later she portrayed Princess Elizabeth, who would grow up to become Helen Mirren as Elizabeth II, in Peter Morgan’s The Audience.
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Earlier this year, Sink received a Tony Award nomination for her lead role in Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain.
Sadie Sink (on desk) and cast of ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’
Julieta Cervantes
Sink is what’s known as a proper actress. Sure, she’s in a big television hit and she’s presently shooting Spider-Man: Brand New Day until the middle of December, but the theater is her home; it’s a place she seeks out.
Bierman saw Sink in New York in John Proctor Is the Villain “and thought she was fantastic.”
He adds that she “has real, great stage presence and obviously has grown up on stage” because of Annie and The Audience.
Bierman and his Empire Productions produced Suzie Miller’s Prima Facie, which won Jodie Comer countless prizes including a Tony and an Olivier.
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He says that Texas-born Sink’s initial meeting with Icke lasted four hours. “And then she just threw herself in and did some workshop sessions with Rob, working on the language and text. And it grew organically from there really, that this was the play, this was the role for her. … As I say, it felt incredibly organic, very much from the ground up.
“And we’re just very fortunate that the stars have aligned because this sort of period of time that she was actually available to do something corresponded with the Harold Pinter Theatre being free,” Bierman explains.
Performances of Romeo & Juliet will start on March 16 for a limited 12-week run through June 6.
Noah Jupe at the 2025 Toronto Film Festival
Deadline
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is scheduled to open on July 31. There has been much speculation about the role Sink has in the Spidey film, and frankly, I do not know the answer, but I do know that she’ll join the cast of the next Avengers picture that shoots here in London later in 2026.
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Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet was the first play that Icke directed professionally back in 2012, and Bierman says that Icke has “unfinished business” to resolve.
“I think for Rob, it’s about trying to explore, actually within the play, the question of time … and how there’s a running motif in the piece about time and how everything’s moving very, very quickly,“ Bierman says. “And potentially, if it didn’t move so quickly, they wouldn’t have the outcome they have. And so he wants to explore it through the prism of time and time running out and just sort of hint at what might have happened if Romeo arrives half an hour later, he might find Juliet awake. But he doesn’t. That’s what makes it so tragic.”
Icke enjoys thoroughly examining classic play texts to help him explore new ways of presenting the piece. A case in point is his stunning contemporary production of Oedipus, which takes place on an election night. It was a hit in London with Mark Strong and Lesley Manville, and producer Sonia Friedman just opened it on Broadway.
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While Icke’s been working in New York, Sink and Jupe have been conducting line readings of the play with him via Zoom from London. Rehearsals for Romeo & Juliet will begun in late January.
Sadie Sink
Caitlin Cronenberg
The creative tram will include set and costume designer Hildegard Bechtler, lighting designer Jon Clark, sound designer Tom Gibbons and video designer Ash J. Woodward.
Casting directors Julia Horan and Jim Carnahan will liaise with Icke for further casting when he returns to the UK in the next few days.
I ask Bierman whether there’s any likelihood of Romeo & Juliet making its way to New York at some point in the future.
He’s quite sensibly cautious. “I think, well for now, I think that’s kind of it. And it’s also — we’ve just filled this nice gap before the next Spider-Man movie comes out, and then [Sink is] busy again.”
Both he and Icke are excited with how Sink has jumped into working on the part. “Juliet as a character has a lot of agency in it, and there’s a lot more of an active journey for her that sometimes doesn’t come out. … She’s lived quite a sheltered life, and her parents are trying to marry her off to Paris,” Bierman tells us. “And she’s realizing that maybe that’s not her fate, but maybe there is a way out of that, that you don’t just have to accept this. And then enter Romeo.”
It’s an opportunity to explore “a Juliet with dynamism and agency,” he declares.
