Sadie Sink was "immediately" drawn to the play John Proctor Is the Villain and knew straight away that Shelby Holcomb was the right character for her.
The Stranger Things star told Glamour that she connected strongly with the characters in the Broadway play, which reframes The Crucible through the perspective of modern high-school students.
"I immediately knew I wanted to play Shelby," the 23-year-old said. "What's so great about it is that even though I loved Shelby - I loved that character and all of her complexities - I loved all the other characters just as much and felt like they were girls that I knew."
She added, "Their dialogue, their banter, just felt like conversations I had been a part of."
Sadie noted that the teenage characters were never "dumbed down", something she considers to be a rarity in scripts.
"It didn't dumb down any of the girls at all, which is sadly really hard to find," she told the publication. "Either writers will make teenage girls wildly too mature, or they go the opposite direction and they're too naïve."
The actress, who got her start on the stage, returned to Broadway following her breakout success as Max Mayfield in Netflix's hit series Stranger Things.
"It was always something I wanted to do," Sadie said of stage acting. "I was a kid when I first did it, so I don't know how much I can remember of it, honestly, or how present I was."
She admitted that the longer she stayed away from the stage, the more anxious she felt about coming back.
"I didn't know how I would react being on stage again," she confessed. "I genuinely thought - we were in tech week, and I remember thinking, This could all crash and burn; there's a huge chance that I will not be able to even go on stage. But I did."
John Proctor Is the Villain ran from April to September. Sadie will make her debut on the London West End stage next year in Shakespeare's famous tragedy Romeo and Juliet, co-starring Noah Jupe.
