Madelyn Cline remembers the exact moment she realized she was famous.
It was during COVID, and she was at LAX, standing in the security line for a flight to South Carolina, where she was about to start shooting season two of Outer Banks, the soapy, sun-soaked teen treasure hunt series that was, back in 2020, just starting to break out as one of Netflix’s hottest epidemic-era hits.
Cline was fully masked and wearing a hat, but somehow got recognized anyway — seemingly, by everyone. Suddenly, while wheeling her carry-on up to the TSA checkpoint, she noticed that the other travelers in the terminal had turned to stare at her, like in a scene from a paranoid sci-fi thriller.
“You kind of gain Spidey senses — you can sense when people are watching or taking pictures,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “But when I was in line at security, all of a sudden I just felt really self-conscious. I felt like I was in one of those dreams where I’d gone to school and forgotten my clothes. I felt naked. That wasn’t something I’d ever felt before.”
Today, at 28, Cline has grown accustomed to people staring at her at airports — and pretty much everywhere else. After six years of outrunning smugglers, hunting buried gold, and generally looking spectacular in various states of maritime distress, playing Sarah Cameron on Outer Banks has made her one of Netflix’s most famous faces — or at least one of its most algorithmically inescapable.
But now, with the show about to drop its fifth and final season on Aug. 20, Cline finds herself in the middle of another awkward moment. Like a long line of Netflix stars before her, she’s attempting to venture beyond the streamer’s orbit into a much more expansive cinematic universe. She’ll soon be appearing in two back-to-back major motion pictures, one of them a Judd Apatow tentpole comedy, The Comeback King, in which she’ll yuck it up opposite Glen Powell, and the other a Johnny Depp comeback vehicle, Day Drinker, in which Cline will occupy what director Marc Webb calls “the pivotal emotional center of the movie.”
It sounds like a natural next step for Cline, especially since she’s already dipped a toe in features, including 2022’s Glass Onion and 2025’s I Know What You Did Last Summer. But the transition out of Netflix and onto bigger screens has proven a perilous one for other actors born-and-bred on the streamer. Only a select few have found a path, like Jacob Elordi, who parlayed his Netflix stardom with the Kissing Booth into HBO stardom with Euphoria, then made the jump to marquee stardom with Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights. Others are still working on it, like Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink, who, in 2022, landed a prestige role in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale and, much more recently, was cast as Jean Grey in Marvel’s upcoming X-Men reboot.
But then there’s Millie Bobby Brown, arguably the biggest female star Netflix has ever hatched. Since playing Eleven on Stranger Things, she’s struggled to carve a place for herself outside the streamer’s subscription base, making just two out-of-network feature films — both co-starring a 400-foot-tall fire-breathing lizard from Japan — before boomeranging back to Netflix to play Sherlock’s sister in the Enola Holmes TV movies.
So, the challenge for Cline right now, as Outer Banks slips into the back row of Netflix’s library, is to make sure people continue staring at her. Not just in airports. Not just in shows or movies produced by the streamer that made her face so famous in the first place. But on whatever screens she decides to appear on next.
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If you do a little treasure hunting on YouTube, you can dig up one of Cline’s earliest performances — a TV ad for a Chuck E. Cheese toy pizza oven shot around 2007, when she was about nine years old. Other clips of her as a kid hawking Sunny D, Nintendo, Mattel’s Furry Frenzies and Swanson’s stuffing may be buried somewhere on the internet, like so much shipwrecked gold, but you’d need John B’s special compass and a boatload of Pogues to find them.
The point is, Cline started working very young.
She grew up in a backwater South Carolina town called Goose Creek, where her mom was a real estate agent and her dad a civil engineer. A nearby mall was apparently swarming with remarkably perceptive talent scouts, because one Christmas, while shopping with her mother and grandmother, Cline got spotted during tryouts for a local talent show. Next thing she knew, she was doing TV ads for computer games and soft drinks.
“I had to grow up very quickly, being surrounded by so many adults on those sets,” she says over a Zoom call, recalling those early acting experiences. “But everyone was very nice, very sweet to the kids. And they gave me free Sunny Ds.”
By her early teens, she and her mom were spending summers in New York City, where Cline’s agent would send them on a merry-go-round of go-sees. When she wasn’t trudging to auditions, she and her mother would pop into the New York Public Library and sign out classic DVDs to watch back at their upper west side sublet. “It was kind of like film school,” she says. “My mom took me through James Dean and Rock Hudson — all these actors through time.”
She did end up going to college, at Coastal Carolina University, where she planned on studying teaching, in case acting didn’t work out. But she left after just six weeks when a taped audition landed her a small part on Stranger Things (she played Tina, the girl who throws the big Halloween party where Nancy breaks up with Steve in season two) and another small role on The Originals, the CW’s Vampire Diaries spinoff (she played a young witch for a few episodes in season four).
“I had to make a decision to stay in college or take the jobs — and I took the jobs,” she says. “My parents weren’t thrilled about it, but those two paychecks ultimately helped me move to L.A.”
She drove herself from South Carolina in a beat-up Toyota 4-Runner and ended up renting a bedbug-infested apartment in North Hollywood. “The bedbugs may have been my fault,” she admits. “A friend told me that in L.A. you don’t have to go furniture shopping because people just leave things on the road. And I saw this gorgeous dresser on the street and thought, ‘Who would throw away this beautiful masterpiece?’ So, I pulled out all the drawers and somehow managed to get it in my car by myself and then up to the apartment. And then not long after that is when the bedbugs arrived.”
It was a rough first year in L.A. To make ends meet, she took a part-time gig at a self-tape studio, helping other actors land their dream roles. But her own auditions dried up, pilot season was a bust, and Cline began to feel “very, very discouraged.” She did manage to snag a few small parts in indie pictures — including a don’t-blink appearance in Joel Edgerton’s Boy Erased — but it was starting to look like maybe a career in teaching wasn’t such a bad idea after all. Even when she heard about a new Netflix show about to begin production in Charleston, not too far from Goose Creek, her agents weren’t able to get her in the room for an audition. At least not the room in L.A.
Luckily, one of Outer Banks’ regional casting directors, Wilmington-based Lisa Mae Fincannon, had worked with Cline back when Cline was in high school, hiring her for the pilot of an ABC legal drama that never got picked up. She had a hunch Cline might be perfect for Outer Banks and finagled an audition for her in Charleston. In other words, after spinning her wheels for a year in Hollywood, living with bedbugs and helping other actors with their self-tapes, Cline had to fly back home to South Carolina to land the role that would make her career.
“I was sleeping in my childhood bedroom,” she says of that fateful trip.
Playing Sarah Cameron — one of the show’s rich-kid “Kooks” who abandons her privileged family after falling for a working-class “Pogue” boy who happens to be the son of a missing treasure hunter — presented some grueling physical challenges. Each season took seven months to shoot, much of it spent in unpleasant locations, like watery caves and vine-choked jungles. And over the course of six years, her character was put through an emotional wringer as well, getting shot, drugged by her stepmother, strangled, nearly drowned, and repeatedly kidnapped — usually while wearing tiny denim cutoffs and a crop top.
Off-screen, there were other trials. Cline and costar Chase Stokes, who played John B., her treasure-hunting boyfriend, began dating in real life after season one, broke up during season two, but awkwardly were required to continue playing lovers on screen in seasons three through five. “There were moments when it was difficult, absolutely,” she says. “But once the dust kind of settled, we were able to just revert to the friendship that we always had. At some point, you look at each other and you’re like, ‘Are you ready to stop being miserable? Because I’m ready.’”
By far the biggest challenge to playing Sarah Cameron, though, was that it made Cline so famous so quickly — literally overnight — that she started to feel underdressed on TSA lines.
Netflix fame is different. Unlike traditional stardom — in which audiences get to know an actor over the course of different movies spaced out over months or years, or in 22-minute weekly increments over the course of a TV run — it’s instantaneous, with the streamer dropping whole seasons, all episodes at once, in one binge-ready package. On April 14, 2020, Cline was a complete unknown; by April 16, millions of viewers had spent 10 full hours absorbing the actress’ every gesture and mannerism, a blast of immersive exposure that generates a whole other level of parasocial intimacy.
“It’s like, here you go, here I am, on a silver platter,” Cline says of the rush of exposure. “There’s no acclimation. No time wasted.”
Then there’s the Instagram accelerant. A show like Outer Banks — aimed at younger viewers who watch Netflix with one eye and their phone with the other — can turn an actor into a mega-influencer before Hollywood has even learned to spell their name. Cline, for instance, currently boasts a whopping 16.4 million followers on Insta. That’s more than Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, Demi Moore, and a slew of other older, more established (and less social media-savvy) stars — a fact that has not gone unnoticed by companies like Revlon and Tommy Hilfiger, both of which have hired Cline as brand ambassadors.
For Cline, the online attention can be both good news and bad — depending on how her feed is behaving on any given day.
“I’ve become a little numb to it, my skin has gotten thicker, but I don’t think it will ever not bother me when my body or my looks are scrutinized,” she says of the constant internet chatter analyzing everything from her weight to the authenticity of her freckles. “There’s just so much noise, so many people talking, so many people who have opinions about me. I don’t think anybody is ready for that. There’s nothing like it.”
Which gets to the paradox of Cline’s current circumstances. She’s got a huge following. She’s incredibly famous on Netflix. Hordes of fans hover over her every post, comment, and appearance. By virtually every modern metric, she’s already a star.
Now she just needs to convince Hollywood.
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Marc Webb didn‘t know much about Cline when Lionsgate first floated her for Day Drinker. In fact, the director of (500) Days of Summer and the Amazing Spider-Man movies had barely seen Outer Banks. All he knew was that he needed a young actress “who could hold up opposite Johnny Depp.”
That’s no small task considering the scrutiny that will likely surround Day Drinker, Depp’s first major dramatic turn since all that bad press over his live-streamed 2022 defamation trial with Amber Heard (unless his performance in November’s Scrooge update Ebenezer turns out to be more Brando-esque than expected). Plot details are still sketchy — the thriller won’t be out till March — but what is known is that Cline plays a bartender on a private yacht who gets mixed up with an enigmatic passenger portrayed by Depp as well as a shadowy criminal figure played by Penelope Cruz, and that all three somehow end up sharing some sort of tragic connection.
“We looked at a lot of people,” Webb says. “But Maddie has a high profile for a young actor — with her social media presence and how well Outer Banks had done — so I went back and watched her show, really studied her performance and I really enjoyed what she had done. She’s beautiful and talented but also has a relatability that I thought was very appealing. And then I spoke to Rian Johnson about her, and he was very, very complimentary.”
Johnson had cast Cline in 2022’s Glass Onion, her first substantial feature performance (albeit still in a Netflix-produced picture). Playing Whiskey, the overly-flirtatious girlfriend of Dave Bautista’s meathead men’s-rights influencer, the role gave her a chance to prove she could be funny — something she leaned into even harder in Universal’s campy I Know What You Did Last Summer reboot last year. And it’s something she’ll be doubling down on yet again next year when she costars with Powell in The Comeback King, the Judd Apatow comedy about a spiraling country-western star due from Universal in February.
But Day Drinker sounds like a whole other sort of swing, requiring Cline to flex dramatic muscles in ways she’d never had to back while being repeatedly kidnapped on Kildare Island. Indeed, to hear Webb describe it, she’s pretty much the emotional linchpin of the entire film. “Johnny’s not one to be particularly vulnerable,” he says. “He’s a dancer, a trickster — one of the great virtuoso actors of our time, but he doesn’t cry on camera. So, I needed somebody who could embrace a kind of pathos and give the movie a heart. And Maddie is very good at that.”
Webb says Cline surprised him with how hard she threw herself into the role. During her first week of shooting, in the middle of the night in the Canary Islands, she had to roll out of a car and wrestle in the dirt with somebody three times her size. “She was just like, ‘Let me do it again, let me do it again!’” he recalls. “She was dogged in her commitment.”
For Cline, Day Drinker will test whether her huge online following and all those fans who’ve spent the last six years watching her survive shipwrecks and shootouts on Netflix are ready to follow her onto dry land and into movie theaters. She certainly seems well-positioned for movie stardom, with a proven touch for comedy and now an upcoming high-profile chance to demonstrate her dramatic chops. But if playing Sarah Cameron has taught her anything, it’s that every adventure comes with some danger, and you never know how it’s going to turn out in the end.
“I was scared,” she admits about taking on what could turn out to be the most consequential role of her career. “I knew it was going to challenge and push me, that it was something that I had not done before. But I was very determined. I was ready for it.”
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