Madelyn Cline on Outer Banks season 3 and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery: Netflix’s breakout star talks fame, films and still feeling ‘starstruck’ around bigwigs like Cate Blanchett – interview
- Hollywood’s favourite young starlet Madelyn Cline talks exclusively to STYLE about the new season of Outer Banks, the Netflix show that propelled her into the spotlight back in 2020
- The actress also appeared in Stranger Things season 2, before landing Glass Onion with Daniel Craig and Kate Hudson; now a budding fashion icon, she rocks Versace and Armani on the red carpet
But that’s just the latest chapter. It was her breakout role as Sarah Cameron in the teen series Outer Banks that propelled Cline to global fame back in 2020, smack in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
When you work on a project and you put your heart and soul into it and a character, it feels like you’re taking your heart out of your chest and putting it out there for judgement
Fans of OBX, as the show is also known, are thoroughly invested in it, obsessing over every move of the renegade bunch of teenagers on a treasure hunt – and the actors playing them. This writer got the bug, bad: on the recommendation of a friend – and with very low expectations – I binged the first two seasons in 2021. In the end, I became so inspired by the show, that I eventually ended up travelling to Charleston, the charming South Carolina town where the series is partly filmed (the Outer Banks are a chain of small islands located in neighbouring North Carolina).
This was not the first fact I shared when dialling Cline on Zoom, on the day the third season of Outer Banks dropped on Netflix.
“Life looks a little different [now] for sure but, it’s been a really cool journey we’ve been on and it’s opened up so many doors. I’ve been able to travel to so many places and meet so many incredible people who are very aligned with myself,” Cline tells STYLE. “It’s been very special – I’ve been able to do things I never thought I’d be able to do and I’m very grateful.”
Clad in a hoodie and a baseball cap while waiting for her order at an In-N-Out Burger drive-through, the 25-year-old South Carolina native appears the definition of the all-American girl. Wholesome, laid-back and completely unguarded, Cline looks back at the last three years of her life with wide-eyed wonder.
“There were moments when I thought, ‘Who do I think I am for thinking that I could do this and move to Los Angeles and actually be a working actor?’” she says of her early days trying to make it in show business. “It’s not easy and it’s so far away and my family is all the way on the other coast. I wouldn’t say that I grew up thinking this is for me and this is what I want to do. It was a build up of things that happened and things that piqued my interest over the years, and then it’s one of those things that felt very serendipitous and kind of snowballed.”
