Madelyn Cline Is Finally Feeling Herself

On a private tennis court overlooking the Silver Lake Reservoir, next to a midcentury mansion that would make Don Draper’s mouth water, Madelyn Cline raises her racket to hit the incoming ball — and whiffs. The Outer Banks star came dressed to play in a matching taupe athletic set and her hair pulled into a high pony. But as influencer-favorite coach Mads Hegelund takes us through a forehand drill, Cline emits a Disney princess grunt each time she lunges for the ball. I am the least athletic person in the world, and I am about to smoke this girl.

“I’ve played a lot more pickleball,” she tells me, after her next shot lands out of bounds. But if anything, Cline is enjoying her humble performance, laughing as we clank rackets for an exaggerated high-five. She’s been talking in interviews about wanting to get better at the game and figured there was no better time to practice than during her first NYLON cover story. “It’s so easy to be jaded sometimes,” she says, “but I try to actively keep my heart pretty open and have that childlike wonder about things.”

After a few final backhand exercises — which we discover is Cline’s superior stroke — we retire to a sitting area just above the court. Though both of us are still sweating, Cline looks like she’s just undergone a K-beauty glass skin routine. She briefly bemoans letting her workout routine slip this summer, then reminds herself that she was, uh, kinda busy: filming a movie in Barcelona, meeting up with friends in Crete, spending time in the South of France, enjoying a weekend in Capri. Such is the life of one of young Hollywood’s shiniest stars.

When Outer Banks premiered on Netflix at the onset of the pandemic — becoming the streamer’s third most popular series that month, behind Ozark and Tiger King — Cline’s public profile skyrocketed. As Sarah Cameron, the rich and often bikini-clad girlfriend of John B (Chase Stokes), Cline became Gen Z’s bombshell-in-chief, gaining over 2 million Instagram followers in the first month it aired.

“Honestly, life changing like it did [made] going through very normal things like breakups and loss have an added dose of cayenne pepper,” says the 26-year-old. For a girl from small-town South Carolina, all the newfound attention rattled her. But these days, she’s learning to embrace the spice. “Sometimes you need someone to slap you around and be like, ‘Shut up. You’re killing it. You’re doing a good job.’”

Nothing shaped young Madelyn Cline’s life like Tumblr. An only child, homeschooled and heavily involved in the Lutheran church, she describes her upbringing as “100% sheltered.” Her parents signed her up for horseback riding and ballet so she could socialize with girls her own age, but Tumblr is where she discovered a community of her own. “That was when those CW supernatural shows were popping off and GIFs and memes were [proliferating]. Some were scandalous, like the ones of implied sex scenes from Teen Wolf or Vampire Diaries,” she says. “I remember the first time I saw one, I shut my computer. I gasped and thought I was going to get in trouble. But I was also like, ‘Oh my God, that’s hot.’’’

It was also, weirdly, kind of comforting. As a teenager, Cline struggled with eating and exercise disorders. Steamy GIFs modeled a different relationship with one’s body. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, there’s so much in owning their sexuality,’” she says. “I didn’t necessarily know how to verbalize that yet, but I always thought those characters were so cool, sexy, and confident.”

Cline describes herself as a late bloomer. “I didn’t have [my first kiss] until I was 16. My first boyfriend and I just drove around and went to church together,” she says. “Then my second boyfriend, I think we were just more good friends than anything. We called each other boyfriend and girlfriend, but it was never like that.”

“I felt like people were thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s spiraling.’ I didn’t know how to handle everything. So I let myself become really hardened.”

After a brief try at college, Cline moved to Los Angeles to try to emulate those cool, sexy, confident stars she watched from afar. “I think I just had this one single goal and a one track mind,” she says. But wherever you go, your baggage follows. “The first two years in LA, I was still very uncomfortable in my own skin. I got here and was like, ‘Sh*t, I feel like I don’t know about f*ck.’” Early on, she took a side gig at a horse farm, tending the stables. “I felt like such a deer in the headlights, and was so overwhelmed that if anybody even looked at me funny, I would absolutely collapse.”

Actor Lukas Gage, Cline’s longtime friend, remembers her as far more confident. “Madelyn and I met on this small, indie movie we worked on many years ago. One night before the shoot we were playing Ping-Pong together in the basement of the house we were filming in, and I’m so clumsy that I accidentally lost control of my paddle and it went through a wall,” Gage recalls. “It left a big hole and I was freaking out that I ruined the set, but Madelyn was just like, ‘I’ve got this.’ Without hesitation she moved furniture around and camouflaged the damage. At that moment I was like, ‘This girl is my ride or die.’ And has been ever since. There’s nobody I have more fun with.”

“I shut my computer. I gasped and thought I was going to get in trouble. But I was also like, ‘Oh my God, that’s hot.’’’

It took Cline many long conversations with herself in the mirror to finally appreciate what others saw in her. “I didn’t come into my skin until I was 21. I had to start rethinking a lot of how I felt about myself and the world,” she says. “It wasn’t until I started to actually love and appreciate myself that [feeling OK with] sexuality came in. It came from confidence and security.”

This burst in confidence also coincided with her booking Outer Banks. And in the tradition of many teen drama stars before them, Cline and her on-screen love interest, Chase Stokes, started dating IRL, fueling interest in the show and turning them into tabloid fodder. (They broke up by the time Season 3 began filming.) “[When] I was 24, 25, I was in a big fight with myself. Oh God, I bleached my hair from root to tip. I was just running away from all the emotions that I was feeling,” she says of this period. “I was also in the midst of discovering who the f*ck I was. Especially after the show came out. I had started building this identity when I moved here, and then all of a sudden, boom, I had this new identity.”

The glare of the spotlight made coping even harder. “I couldn’t be authentic because I felt like people were thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s spiraling,’” she says. “Which in a way, I was, because I didn’t quite know how to handle everything that was in front of me. So I let myself become really hardened.”

Cline does not seem like someone who’s hardened. When our interview ends, and I start debating what to do until my dinner plans, she asks if I’d want to keep hanging over a glass of wine. And when I say yes, of course, but I’d need to change out of my tennis clothes — she offers the passenger seat of her Mazda rental as a dressing room.

Pulling up to the bar, Cline spots a Byredo shop next door. “Would you mind stopping in?” she asks, before testing out an entire display’s worth of fragrances. The clerk recommends we let the scents fully settle on her skin before choosing, so we head over to drink in the meantime. One round in, Cline’s done waiting and excuses herself to purchase an extra-large shopping bag’s worth of perfumes and candles. “I went for it,” she says, as we cheers our glasses of organic orange wine.

“I was in a big fight with myself. I bleached my hair from root to tip. I was just running away from all the emotions that I was feeling.”

Still, for all her openness, there are aspects of her life she draws hard boundaries around. Like when I ask about her breakup with comedian Pete Davidson (which, contrary to some reports, happened in early 2024) and she says she’d rather not talk about their relationship. So I ask instead what it’s like to be with someone whose dating life is so obsessed over on the internet. “The jokes write themselves,” she says, smirking, pleased to leave it at that.

Besides, Cline isn’t one to dwell on regrets. “We love all past versions [of ourselves] because we are here now because of them,” she tells me. So what other versions of Cline await? This fall, she’ll film the reboot of I Know What You Did Last Summer and try her hand at being a scream queen. There’s another season of Outer Banks to shoot, too. Her Banks pal Drew Starkey is in a new movie with her Glass Onion co-star Daniel Craig — maybe she could be a Bond girl?

Cline momentarily looks like she’s going to faint with excitement. She tilts her head down, letting her hair fall in front of her face, before flipping it back up in a dramatic fashion and revealing a giant grin. “I sit here, before Silver Lake and this really tall palm tree, manifesting that I am a Bond girl,” she says.

What would the sheltered, laptop-shutting version of Cline think of her playing one of cinema’s most celebrated sex symbols?

“She’d love it. Maybe she’d be like…” Cline says while covering her eyes with her hands. “But she’d for sure be peeking.”