Fans were beyond excited when they found out that Sadie Sink and Dylan O'Brien were starring in Taylor Swift's All Too Well: The Short Film, which came out along with Red (Taylor’s Version). However, Sink just opened up to Teen Vogue about the flip side of their casting, saying, "I remember some people were really weirded out by the age difference. Like, 'Why would they cast these two actors together with this age gap?' I'm like, 'What? It was true to her.'"
At the time, Sink was only 19 and O'Brien was 30, but it is important to note that this song was based on a real-life relationship age gap for Swift. In an interview with Variety, O'Brien confessed that being in a music video is a "space that makes me really uncomfortable." He then continued to explain, "For that to be her first time directing, Taylor had the absolute right instinct to be like, 'I hired these actors because I am a fan of the work that they’ve done, and I’m going to let them come in and do that work. I loved what she was trying to tell with that. And I fully felt like I understood my role in it, and that excited me."
As for Swift, she said on Late Night with Seth Meyers, "The only two people that I imagined playing the two characters — it was Sadie and Dylan. [Sadie] was the first one I went to, and if Sadie had said no, I don't think I would've made it."
One of the most talked about sequences in the music video is the fight scene between their characters. Sink actually revealed to Bustle that the dialogue was all improvised: "When she told me she kept that scene, I was like, 'What are you talking about?' It was completely on the fly; I don’t remember anything I said; we only did one take."
"I remember they attached microphones to us, and I was like, 'Why are they making us wear a mic?' I thought they were just capturing our mouths moving, and we were going to visualize a fight in the kitchen [with music playing over it]. I just went with whatever came up in the moment. It was a crazy, fun acting game, and it happened to be in the final cut."
The actress then expressed, "But 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. So for her 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."
Additionally, in her conversation with Teen Vogue, she praised Swift as a director and said she would "definitely collaborate with her again" and that she "loved working with her."
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