Hero Magazine - Summer zine 5 - madelyn cline
published in print june 2021
To come home, to leave home, and to stay are three pillars in our lives that share no foundation other than experience itself. Evading definition through compounded emotions that fracture with the weight of change, these occurrences bend to the will of tangible memories, creating a chain reaction where the present triggers the past and burdens the future. Madelyn Cline, the 23 year old actress and star of the Netflix-original series Outer Banks knows a thing or two about all three as she dropped out of college and chose to leave home at the age of 18. She wanted to be a version of herself that was winged not chained to the predictability of comfort and so, she went west to Los Angeles where she remained until the role beckoned her home. Leaving home made and broke her, she lived in cars, cried in silence and questioned her decision many times as the sun set over the Pacfic ocean. Upon her return to Charleston, she found that she was already someone else. In the in between, the liminal space where growth is latitude and community is longitude, is where she will stay.
Talking to Madelyn feels like talking to an old friend. She speaks freely about her anxieties and sustained emotional labor, divulging intimacies without hesitation while maintaining a demure composure. She analyzes human behavior with fond interest and “loves to unpack” her bubbly voice quickening as we continue to wade into deeper waters where our feet barely touch bottom. Treading water becomes an exercise in trust as Hero chats with Madelyn about the importance of speaking up, perfectionism, aging and community, and all of a sudden we are home.
Lindsey: Hey, Madelyn, how's it going?
Madelyn: So good. So good.
Lindsey: Outer Banks takes place in the home you knew growing up and you got to see it through your character, Sarah Cameron’s eyes, a lens entirely different than your own. What does home mean to you?
Madelyn: When I left home in South Carolina, just a little outside of Charleston, I kind of ran for the hills. I was determined that I was never going to go back. I had dropped out of college and I wasn't really sure what was going to happen but I figured, fuck it, let's give this a shot. Outer Banks ended up bringing me back and I wasn't super thrilled initially but then it ended up really just sweeping the rug out from under me because I fell back in love with where I'm from. Home for me means having the right people around you, it wasn't about a location per se, it was about the community.
Lindsey: When you left home that first time and what about it made you want to leave? Being from Hawaii, I loved it but wanted life in the big city and in a way, I wanted to be a different version of myself.
Madelyn: I think you hit the nail on the head. I'm a very restless person to begin with which is one of the reasons why I love my job is because I'm never in one place for too long. I was in this place where I was like, I've been here for 18 years and I didn’t want my life to look the same as it has so I took the most drastic means possible and moved as far away across the country as I possibly could. I had to grow up really quickly because I wasn't surrounded by the support system that I normally had and there were many times that I thought it that I had made too rash of a decision because I missed what was comfortable, but it's kind of like that old, corny saying that everything worthwhile is outside of your comfort zone. The person I am now versus the person that I left behind, I love a lot more. That's not to say that I didn’t love the person that I left behind in South Carolina but I think about her sometimes and I wish I could be there for her in ways that the people around her couldn't. I don't know if I was running from anything but I was running towards making something of myself.
Lindsey: Right and you’ve spoken about finding your voice through your involvement in the show and I mean, what do you want to say with that voice and how does that relate to you being a bit of a perfectionist?
Madelyn: I think what I've learned is that the most important thing to me is approaching as much as I can in this life with empathy and to speak up. A lot of times growing up I felt the need to not say anything, I would plaster a smile on my face even if I didn't feel comfortable to not cause conflict. I think sometimes being raised in the South does kind of have a bit of an influence on that and the fear of conflict actually ended up being a barrier to community and in friendship. Speaking up has been a really positive change in my life and other people might go benefit from you being honest.
Lindsey: It's interesting that empathy is so important to you because it seems like such a essential part of your job but it’s not necessarily something you can learn or be taught. It also means something different to everyone.
Madelyn: I think it kind of really started for me in high school, my favorite subject was english and one of my favorite things was character analysis. I've always been really fascinated with human behavior. Sometimes if something like a decision or choice is made that I can't initially understand or it hurts someone’s feelings, my first instinct is to dwell on it and in doing so, I try to gain an understanding.Sometimes it causes me to be forgiving to a fault and can be a little unhealthy because I can't rationalize to set boundaries. People don’t always want to tap into their own emotional vulnerabilities but they can be taught to be empathetic.
Lindsey: Right and related to this whole context, it’s really looking at the differences between understanding and acceptance. It sounds like you do a lot of emotional labor and in doing so, do you readily make yourself vulnerable?
Madelyn: I love these conversations. I love to unpack. When I first moved out to LA I fully was not prepared for how emotionally drained I would be going into such a high energy place with so many different people and so many different energies and personalities. When you're still learning about yourself, you kind of mirror other people's energies around you and so when I first got here, I felt really lost because I was soaking up a lot of people's energies. I realized that it was going to be really important for me to find people who had the same interests as I did and would want to have these kinds of conversations. I definitely am not as trusting as I used to be just by way of getting burned by certain relationships, but at the same time, you can either detach completely from a situation and heal, or continue to stay vulnerable and be in touch with those emotions. I actively choose the latter, it feels more human and helps in my career. You learn how to protect yourself without putting up walls.
Lindsey: Right I always tell myself that stability is the product of risk and you know this image that everyone strives to embody, composed, perfect and yet, carefree? I begin to think about the freedoms you’re afforded in being perceived as perfect in a generation that has such a collectivist mindset. It’s a funny duality that is presented in relation to social media, which really was the only way for you to gauge the reaction to the show since it was released during quarantine.
Madelyn: Growing up, I would read people's faces to gauge a positive or a negative reaction and I wanted people to like me. When you're getting your footing in the world, you don’t realize that there's no freedom in making everybody happy and it’s not human to be perfect. Once the show came out, there was this big, broad collective response on social media and it was overwhelmingly positive but of course some it wasn’t all positive. I had to realize that I'm playing a character and if my character is creating a response in someone to feel some type of way then I'm doing my job. There's a lot of freedom in knowing that. It’s not my job to make people happy and at the end of the day, it's okay because if I'm living my life for myself then I'm happy with myself.
Lindsey: It's interesting when you kind of realize that happiness is subjective and for you, I feel like it has to do with this sense of community but that’s also subjective too.
Madelyn: With social media, you’ll find all these subcultures within apps, and it's funny because I could make an obscure reference related to TikTok and eight out of 10 people would probably understand it. Nowadays you have this broad sense of community and then you shrink it down to the people around you. Social media is large, it’s everyone and there's so many opinions going around and I think it's really helpful to see and learn from other people from other walks of life that you aren’t normally around. Then breaking it down to my friend group, community means being around the people who are equally excited for you as you are for them. It doesn't necessarily mean that we have to talk all the time, it doesn't mean we have to be texting constantly, it's about finding the people who will reciprocate,
Lindsey: Yeah and you want to be able to feel a sense of longevity with it too and it’s weird how longevity has become oddly synonymous with things like relevance which then somehow becomes a conversation about age.
Madelyn: I’ve been on Tik Tok ok a few times and I've been called by definition “old” because Vine is now a reference that Millennials make or I’ll find videos making fun of millennials. It's obviously all fun and games, but it's interesting that it feels like it’s all come to fruition with this rise of short form media, it's like what can hold our attention span before moving on to the next thing. It's definitely a little mind boggling to experience it on the other side. With the show having come out last year, you see how quick the turnover rate is in entertainment.
Lindsey: How do you process aging in general because maturation is a different thing entirely? We try to be almost as young as we can for as long as we can but to what extent are we allowed to mature while still being young?
Madelyn: There's this stigma of being older and I saw this meme the other day and someone was like, do people just expect women to just turn into hags once we turn 30? There's this stigma around not being in your 20s almost and once you pass that, it’s time to settle down or whatever. There are these expectations where this is the age for this, or the time for that and I'm young, I'm 23 and I'm enjoying being in my 20s but some of the most amazing people I've met, are older than I am and I admire them because it's not like they aged, they just got older, they’ve kept their energy and joie de vivre but they’ve accepted the fact that they're just getting older. Maturing is a different animal. I'm not necessarily afraid of it because I think about what I know now versus what I knew three years ago and I'm kind of excited. I've learned a lot and you can only learn from your experiences. And I'd rather be older and still have the love of life that I do and gain more knowledge and meet more people than I would be afraid of growing older.