Sadie Sink Negotiates Lead Role and Producing 'The Guest'

There’s a curious symmetry to the casting rumors: the actor who helped define a generation of eerie summers on screen might soon embody one on page. Sadie Sink, best known for her breakout turn in Stranger Things, is reportedly in talks to play the lead and serve as a producer on A24’s film adaptation of Emma Cline’s bestselling novel The Guest.

Behind-the-scenes momentum is building. A24 and Square Peg are said to be negotiating the adaptation, while Lorene Scafaria — the filmmaker behind heartfelt, character-driven work — is in talks to direct. If those pieces fall into place, the project will pair a studio known for singular, atmospheric cinema with a writer-director who understands how to find humanity in morally complicated characters.

Why does The Guest feel like perfect source material for A24? Because it operates in the kind of moral twilight the company often explores. The novel, published by Penguin Random House in 2023, follows Alex, a cunning and opportunistic woman trying to survive a fraught summer in the Hamptons. After a social misstep, she’s effectively abandoned at a train station with little money and a water-damaged phone. She has one unusual skill: an uncanny ability to read people’s desires. She drifts through wealthy, hedge-lined streets and gated homes like a ghost — welcomed nowhere, feared or ignored everywhere.

It’s a portrait of social decay rendered intimate and precise. Alex moves through the run-up to Labor Day without fixed morals, hustling from place to place and leaving wreckage in her wake. The tension of the book comes less from violence than from the quiet corrosion of lives that should have stayed intact.

The Guest has already earned serious attention. It was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award, chosen by Belletrist Book Club, and counted among year-end best-books lists from The New Yorker, Time, and NPR. The buzz around Emma Cline isn’t new: her latest, Switzy, made this year’s Booker longlist, and her debut, The Girls, sold in a high-profile three-book deal reportedly worth two million dollars — a novel partly inspired by the Manson murders and notable for its unnerving, seductive narrator.

Cline told Vanity Fair that she began writing The Guest in 2016 and that she’s drawn to narratives where characters flout conventional morality. She cited influences like The Talented Mr. Ripley: stories that track the chaos such people create are, she said, irresistibly compelling. Choosing the Hamptons as a backdrop, she explained, was a deliberate contrast — a gilded landscape that intensifies the novel’s social dissonance.

That contrast is exactly what makes the property attractive to filmmakers. Imagine sunlit lawns and quiet cul-de-sacs framing a protagonist who slips in and out of lives without permission. Imagine the small, sharp moments that reveal character more than spectacle ever could. Imagine Sadie Sink — an actor capable of stillness and rawness — negotiating those subtleties on screen while also shaping the production from a producer’s vantage.

If talks proceed and deals are finalized, this adaptation could be another example of literary fiction finding a cinematic home at A24 — a studio that often elevates intimate, unsettling stories into something both beautiful and disquieting. For readers and viewers who like their summer settings to hide secrets beneath the sand, this one is worth watching closely.

Keep an eye on the trades: if this comes together, expect a quietly nervous, impeccably cast Hamptons thriller.