What It Really Took For Sadie Sink To Master Skateboarding For Stranger Things
Blood, grit, and big air: skateboarding’s boom is built on risk, where one perfect landing makes a career and one bad fall can end it. As the sport barrels into primetime, the thrills are higher—and the consequences harder.
Stranger Things might be over, but the afterglow is still very much a thing. Case in point: Sadie Sink just talked about how she learned to skateboard for Max, and it turns out the board was not her happy place.
Quick catch-up
- Stranger Things 5 wrapped a month ago, officially ending the Netflix juggernaut.
- Netflix dropped a new documentary focused on the final season.
- Finn Wolfhard recently hosted Saturday Night Live and spoofed the show (and what could come next) during the 2026 TV season.
Max loved to skate. Sadie… not so much
Sink joined the show in Season 2 as Max Mayfield, the skater who rolled into Hawkins and quickly became a fan favorite. On screen, Max looks like she was born on a board. Off screen? Different story.
In a video posted on the official Stranger Things Instagram, Sink explained that she had to learn to skateboard for the role, and the training was a grind. She was also juggling lines and the whole complicated setup of doing school around filming, which made the schedule even more intense. And yes, this is the same character whose love of music helped yank her out of the Upside Down more than once. Skateboarding, though, was a separate kind of battle.
'I had to learn how to skateboard for the show. I didn't really like it, if I'm being honest, because I had to do it for three hours every single day after school, and it just became annoying, and I was also very scared of getting hurt. And they made me wear a helmet and knee pads and elbow pads, which I guess is important, but I felt really dorky skating around the studio.'
Three hours a day, pads on, ego off
Three hours every day after school is a lot for anyone, let alone a teenager working full-time on a hit series. The helmet, knee pads, and elbow pads did their job, but they also made her feel, in her words, pretty dorky scooting around the studio. Honestly, fair.
Could a double have handled some of the trickier rides? Probably. We don't know how much of the skating was actually her, but if you watched the show, the result speaks for itself. She looked natural enough on camera that you never think twice about it.
Would she ever skate again?
Now that the show is done, Sink says getting back on the board would 'depend' — but she also added she would 'not willingly' do it. The goodbye to Stranger Things was as emotional as you'd expect, but it sounds like she's perfectly fine retiring the deck. Maybe forever, maybe not — just not anytime soon.
If you want to revisit her Max-era skills, the whole series is sitting on Netflix for anyone with a subscription. The show may be over, but at least one cast member is happily coasting away from the skateboarding part of it.