As Romeo And Juliet, Sadie Sink And Noah Jupe Are Ready To “Make It Fun”
It’s a couple of hours earlier than the night service at Ida, a tiny family-run Italian neighborhood in west London, and the home windows are already steaming up. Outside, there’s an umbrella-buckling January downpour. Inside, although, a pure Fifties-style romance is being cooked up. Beneath the restaurant’s gallery partitions, adorned with classic Fellini posters, sit two of the brightest younger actors of their era – Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe – wearing The Sweet Life-esque apparel, every sipping on a glass of Sangiovese and feeding one another mouthfuls of pomodoro pasta. They snigger and whisper, arms entangled, candlelight flickering. Watching from the sidelines – amid the circus of vogue rails, stylists and crew – it is exhausting to consider they aren’t a kissed younger couple.
“This is basically mine and Sadie’s entire relationship,” says a primped and preened Jupe as soon as the digital camera shutters pause, laughing. The loved-up efficiency is all good prep for his or her upcoming starring roles in director and playwright-of-the-moment Robert Icke’s Romeo & Julietopening on the Harold Pinter Theater subsequent month. Both actors are coming down from a whirlwind a couple of weeks: 23-year-old Sink is reckoning with the top of Stranger Things – the televisual juggernaut to whom she has devoted nearly 10 years of her life – and Jupe, 21, along with his jet lag from a visit to LA for the Golden Globes, the place his movie, Hamnetgained large. Suffice it to say, there’s been little time to hang around. “We did a chemistry read together and that was, what, like, an hour?” Sink recollects, leaning in direction of Jupe for affirmation. “And then the second time we met…” “We had to do a full-on photoshoot for it,” Jupe cuts in, referring to the posters at the moment papering London’s billboards and Tube tunnels. They’re already ending one another’s sentences.
Jupe and Sink will, in fact, play Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet: the younger, reckless lovers from feuding households whose on the spot, forbidden infatuation – and secret marriage – ends with their premature and, in Icke’s view, totally avoidable deaths. In reality, the award-winning Icke – whose newest adaptation, Oedipusstarring Lesley Manville and Mark Strong, has simply wrapped up its acclaimed Broadway switch – it’s much less within the tragedy of all of it than within the coincidence of them assembly within the first place. “It’s so fragile, the way the events lead to each other,” he tells me over the telephone. Messages fail. Timing betrays them. “It’s the kind of play that claims, ‘Well, should you cease for a espresso on the fallacious time, you may miss your soulmate.’ If Romeo have been to show up at Juliet’s tomb about 4 minutes later, he would discover her alive and so they’d be completely fantastic.” It is sensible then that for this manufacturing – which might be set in a “version of now” Verona – Icke drew a few of his inspiration from the 1998 cult movie Sliding Doors.
