Taylor Swift's “All Too Well” music video was more than just a three-minute montage; it was basically a full mini-movie starring Stranger Things star Sadie Sink opposite Dylan O'Brien, with a cameo from Swift herself, who also served as director, at the end. Though it's been awhile since the short film dropped, certain scenes still stick in our heads — namely, the fight scene between the couple played by Sink and O'Brien, which Sink just revealed was totally improvised in just one take.
In a new interview with Bustle, Sink shared that the fight scene was done totally off the cuff, and she was shocked that Swift kept it in the final cut. “It was completely on the fly; I don’t remember anything I said; we only did one take,” the actor explained. “I remember they attached microphones to us, and I was like, ‘Why are they making us wear a mic?’"
Sink thought they were filming to capture action to be played with the song over it, but her dialogue stayed in. “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.”
That improvisation paid off and gave the music video a more raw, unpolished feeling. “What’s so cool and realistic about it is that in a fight, it’s not supposed to be completely well thought-out," Sadie Sink explained. “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," the actor continued. "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.”
Swift wanted Sink for the project and said that if the actor hadn't signed on, she wouldn't have done it at all. Sink called the musician “a huge part of my life” and said she's been a fan since she was a kid, so working with her was a pretty big deal. (Sink has even admitted to using Swift's songs to help her get into character in the past.)
“It was wildly confusing at first because I never thought of myself as someone who would even reach her desk,” Sadie had said of Swift. “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. It was amazing that she recognized that in me somehow, that I would understand the song, the message, the story she was trying to tell.”
