As Madelyn Cline prepares to bid farewell to Outer Banks, she’s opening up about the physical and emotional toll of her onscreen career.
The actress, who has recently been filming the fifth and final season of the Netflix adventure series, recently admitted that she’s often considered quitting the industry, as she compared the practice to “a torture ritual,” but she still remains “very grateful” for the work she’s been able to do.
“I can say with my entire chest, every single one I’ve ever done,” she said in Interview Magazine when asked which roles have made her feel that way. “I’m on set a lot, when I’m swimming with rats or yesterday, we were—oh, I can’t say anything. I’ll just say they put us in the elements. Yesterday I was soggy, and there was a lot of wind, and I was cold.”
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Cline continued, “And I didn’t even have the worst of it. I was standing there like a wet rat, really uncomfy. I think I have athlete’s foot now. [Laughs] I definitely have an amoeba. I was just like, this is a torture ritual. I’m not complaining. I’m very grateful. On very physical jobs sometimes you have to put yourself through the wringer, and like any job, there’s some days you just don’t want to do it.”
Since the show debuted in 2020, Cline has starred in Outer Banks as wealthy, privileged Sarah Cameron, who teams up with a group of less affluent friends to hunt for a legendary treasure.
“Then there’s other jobs where it’s a little bit more of an emotional thing, where you put yourself into some sort of mindset or mental space to be empathetic towards a situation or a character that’s actually really, really difficult to be in,” explained Cline. “You come home at night, and you’re just restless because you’ve disassociated from yourself for the day, and you need to come back. That’s hard.”
After recently wrapping Lionsgate‘s Day Drinker with Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz, Cline called the crime thriller shoot “a really emotionally intense one.”
Directed by Marc Webb, Day Drinker is about a cruise ship bartender who meets a mysterious day drinker—only for both of them to find themselves entangled in a criminal underbelly, and connected in unexpected ways.