Sadie Sink Defends The Age Gap In Taylor Swift's All Too Well Video
Sink was 19 when she filmed the video with a 30-year-old co-star.
Sadie Sink remembers the conversation around her 2021 Taylor Swift collaboration all too well. At the time, Sink was 19 years old, and starring in Swift’s romantic drama with a 30-year-old Dylan O’Brien. While the 11-year age gap startled some viewers, Sink argues that the casting was done —as the lyrics say — in the name of being honest.
About three-and-a-half years after Swift released All Too Well: The Short Film, Sink opened up about the criticism around her age in the music video. “I remember some people were really weirded out by the age difference,” Sink told Teen Vogue on April 3. “Like, ‘Why would they cast these two actors together with this age gap?’” The 15-minute cinematic interpretation of Swift’s beloved song “All Too Well” starred Sink as a teenager in a crumbling relationship with an older man.
Sink believed those critics didn’t understand the story being told. “I’m like, ‘What? It was true to her,’” Sink said. “[Swift] knows what she’s doing. She knows what she wants, and also, she’s so personable and fun to be around and comfortable. That was really good for me. I loved working with her.”
As Sink suggested, “All Too Well” has always hinted at being about a romance with a relatively significant age gap. This became much more explicitly stated in Swift’s 2021 re-release of the song, which nearly doubled the breakup ballad’s length to just over 10 minutes and added telling new lyrics.
“You said if we had been closer in age, maybe it would’ve been fine,” Swift sang in the updated version, also including new lines like, “It’s supposed to be fun turning 21,” and “I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age.”
The song is widely believed to be about Swift’s short-lived romance with Jake Gyllenhaal in 2010, whom she was seeing during her 21st birthday at the end of that year. Sink and O’Brien’s ages in the short film closely mirror Swift and Gyllenhaal’s actual ages at that time: Swift would have been 20 and Gyllenhaal would have just turned 30.
Art does imitate life, after all.