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The girl is tired. Since the dawn of TikTok and the rapid acceleration of the trend cycle that it now relentlessly powers, we’ve watched entire aesthetics and identities rise and fall at breakneck speed. One archetype, the “sleepy girl,” has displayed a bit more longevity than others. Maybe all the power naps?
The sleepy girl has inspired products including Hailey Bieber’s popular shade of blush and a supposedly drowsing beverage combining tart cherry juice and magnesium, and has found her way into the annals of public health (“Should You Try the Sleepy Girl Mocktail?” the Cleveland Clinic asked in 2023). The sleepy girl doesn’t need to look a certain way, other than flushed from just waking up. All she has to do is want to lie down. Her patron saint might be the actor Madelyn Cline, who showed up apologetically late to lunch on a gray afternoon in early spring, her eyelids heavy, her hair pillowcase-teased.
Marc Jacobs dress. To create a similar makeup look: Paintstick in Genuine Orange and Lipglass in Muted Rose Pink by MAC.
You, too, would be tired. A few days earlier, Cline spent an afternoon packing for the rest of the year. She had only recently made her first real estate purchase, a house in LA. “I don’t like too big of a space,” Cline tells me over brunch at the restaurant of an eco-luxury hotel in Midtown Manhattan, “I feel like I’m a goldfish in an aquarium.” Then she flew to New York for a photo shoot and press appointments for The Map That Leads to You, a romance adapted from the novel of the same name, co-starring Riverdale hunk KJ Apa. Her ponderous hair, I found out, was teased from her Allure shoot the previous morning, and her face exhibited traces of concealer and mascara and a minimum of slumber.
Marc Jacobs dress. Urban Outfitters tights. Retrouvai and Jade Ruzzo rings.
After that, she’d be off to the Dream It Convention in Paris, where she’d appear in and out of character as Outer Banks’s Sarah Cameron, the role that has become her star vehicle, followed by a detour to St. Vincent and the Grenadines for a Tommy Hilfiger event (Cline is a Tommy Girl, as well as a Revlon brand ambassador), then Spain, to film a movie, then Charleston, to shoot the fifth and final season of Outer Banks. As usual, she tossed some pairs of pajamas and jeans into her suitcase. “I go from home, to set, and back,” she says wearily. Also in her luggage are her Apple TV or PlayStation, along with a Max Mara bag and fragrances from Frederic Malle and Byredo.
“I think it's time to grow up again.”
A large blazer and larger Bottega Veneta hobo conspire to make Cline appear even smaller than she is. Her pixieness is undercut by a deep, pan-seared voice afflicted with a chronic case of sailor’s mouth. (On her old reluctance to tell the truth: “I never wanted to be caught with my dick in my hands. But now I’m like, fuck it.”)
Cline’s ascent happened at just the right time. OBX, as it’s come to be known, can be called one of the great hits of the streaming age, helped in no small part by the show’s timely premiere in April 2020; the show, a gorgeously cast teen Treasure Island, drifts not too far from the shores of reality. (Cline and her other-side-of-the-tracks love interest, played by the heartthrob Chase Stokes, dated for several months, but broke up in 2021.) Data company Luminate estimated 1.2 billion minutes were watched during the most recent season 4’s premiere week, which nets out to more than 2,000 years of consecutive viewing, give or take a decade.
Issey Miyake dress. Cline’s own earring.
Since then, she’s appeared in movies like This Is the Night and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, campaigns for brands like Stella McCartney and Tommy. Still, 2025 represents an inflection point for Cline, who will lead not one but two movies this summer: Before The Map premieres in August, she’ll appear alongside Jennifer Love Hewitt and Chase Sui Wonders in I Know What You Did Last Summer, a “new installment” in the thrasher franchise. Her trip to New York wouldn’t just take her from Los Angeles but keep her on the road for the next 300 days, more or less. It’s under circumstances like these, when waking time becomes a finite resource, that Cline will go on what she calls “sleep strikes.” “I want to be able to stay up and have my alone time,” she explains, “but then I'm enjoying it so much that I don't sleep.”
The weekend before she came to New York, she stayed up for 48 hours. She remembers taking an afternoon nap and waking up well after sunset, only after a friend came over to check on her and found her in her garage, watching the wall like it was a movie screen. “She was like, ‘You were staring at the wall, talking about how someone kidnapped Lukas and took him away from you,’” Cline whispers. The incident in question, concerning her friend, the actor Lukas Gage, stemmed from a logistics error in arrivals for the Vanity Fair Oscars party red carpet. “I was replaying all these memories of things that had happened in the last couple of weeks,” Cline says. “I was clearly dreaming.”
Ferragamo top. To create a similar makeup look: Multi-Use Longwearing Eyeshadow in Jade Facetté and Le Vernis Longwear Nail Color in Rêveuse by Chanel.
Her friend was concerned. So was I, a little bit. Cline says she only sleepwalks when she’s stressed or tired. “I've woken up in the middle of carrying a tray of food to the couch,” she says, giggling. “Like, what the fuck am I doing?” She shrugs. “I’m a sleepy girl.”
Drive about 30 minutes north of downtown Charleston, pass the airport, and you’ll arrive in a town called Goose Creek, where Cline grew up. “You have your Hobby Lobby, you have your Starbucks, your Dunkin’,” Cline says. “You have everything.” She has a natural deadpan delivery that makes it difficult to discern between sincerity and sarcasm. Cline attended classes a few days a week but was otherwise homeschooled. Her bedroom, where she spent her holiday breaks, was blanched white and stuffed with antique furniture. “I could close my door, shut it, not speak to anyone,” she says. “It was pure joy.”
"I am a sleepy girl."
Like other girls in her cohort, Cline attended classes at a local modeling agency in Charleston and was encouraged to spend a summer in New York, which she found preferable to her other options. “I didn't want to go to tennis camp, or woods camp—Ew,” she says, shuddering. Her parents, an engineer for Charleston Water System and a real estate agent, were supportive of her ambitions, and her mom accompanied her during a number of Manhattan working summers. They were still supportive, if puzzled, when Cline decided to drop out of college after a few weeks and drive to Los Angeles to entrench herself in the entertainment industry.
Balenciaga bra top and pantaskirt. Mateo earrings.
Mateo earring. To create a similar makeup look: ColorStay Day to Night Eye Shadow Quad in Decadent, Powder Blush in Naughty Nude, and Super Lustrous Glass Shine Balm in Naked Illuminatory by Revlon. Luxury Mink Lashes by i-ENVY.
Shortly after arriving in LA, Cline hit a wall. Her apartment, with its TV perched on an overturned plastic bin, was infested with bed bugs, she told the Ready, Set, Spill! podcast. Cline worked part-time at a company that helped other actors film “self-tape” reels, and battled her jealousy toward friends going on auditions by offering to drive them and run lines, all the while wondering if, or where, she belonged.
Cline’s early roles came not from Hollywood agents but closer to home. She was cast in Danny McBride’s Vice Principals in 2016, and her Southeast casting director supported her to get a bit part on Netflix’s Stranger Things. Another small role followed in the film Boy Erased, starring Nicole Kidman, which, like Stranger Things, was filmed in Atlanta. She was cast in Outer Banks in 2019, when she was nearly 22 years old. “I was so baby,” she says. She's 27 this year, when filming commences on the final season. “We’re finally super seniors,” Cline adds. “Got held back a bit.”
“I never wanted to be caught with my dick in my hands. But now I’m like, fuck it.”
Her feelings going into the final season are “excited” and “ready.” “I think everybody’s kind of there,” she says. “I think it’s time to grow up again.” No matter how she matures, on screen or off, it should be said that Cline is casually gorgeous enough to be the subject of hundreds of TikTok Madelyn Cline makeup tutorials, which attempt to cosmetically replicate her distinctly feline eyes; many creators have to start by lengthening their eyebrows.
Loewe jacket. Marc Jacobs skirt.
To create a similar makeup look: Kryolan Pure Pigments Metallic in Pure Silver and Rouge Dior Refillable Lipstick in Beige Couture by Dior.
We walk a few doors down to a Manhattan nail salon, which is warmly lit and nearly empty, except for a woman in a pedicure chair engaged in an apparent conference call, complete with headset. Cline doesn’t notice, or politely decides not to. She opts for a bubblegum pink gel pedicure; it’s Ballet Slippers for me. Cline slips off her flats for the pedicurist, revealing the lyrics to The Cure’s 1989 stormy ballad, “The Same Deep Water As You”: The shallow drowned lose less than we. Dainty inked messages appear sporadically on her limbs, and she has a finger tattoo that says “promise.” “Most of them are drunk decisions,” she says.
On body image: “That’s my Roman Empire.”
Has her work changed the way she sees herself in the mirror? Cline’s drowsy eyes widen. “This is my Roman Empire,” she says. Cline has spoken publicly about her struggles with disordered eating. “People love to pay attention to weight specifically. It's very bizarre to me. From season to season on Outer Banks, my appearance has changed with lots of factors: stress, breakups, healthy or unhealthy habits with food. It’s normal life. But the camera, swear to God, picks up everything. Like, damn. Can I not be on my period? Can I not have a beer the night before?” She adds, “In the comment sections, we are not always family.”
Cline says that her demanding travel schedule has made it difficult to date. I would argue she has had plenty of opportunities. She famously dated Stokes for a little over a year, and her reported exes since include the musician Jackson Guthy and, of course, Pete Davidson. “The jokes, they write themselves,” Cline says of Davidson. “And I said it before, and I'll say it again, that is my only comment,” though she allows that “He has a really cute dog and some really great girlfriends now.”
“I want to experience this life on my terms first, before I do all the relationship stuff.”
“I want to experience this life on my terms first, before I do all the relationship stuff,” she says. "When I go to work, I get pretty locked in, and I get really, really overwhelmed sometimes when the priorities start stacking up and I'm trying to figure out where to put my energy.” The fact that she is rarely living in one place for more than 90 days at a time has put a strain on relationships, she adds.
Cline is single and not quite worried about settling down yet. She describes the friction between her ambition, which powered her to pursue her career—those summers in New York; the bedbugs and carpools in LA—and a pervasive sense that she’s not quite good enough. “It causes a little Menty B every now and again,” she says.
“I have these crazy anxieties, and I get freaked out. I do have impostor syndrome. And that's just very human, but also, I can do it. I've gotten this far.”
“I can't think too hard about it because then I'll get really existential and treat myself badly.” The only thing that can smooth the friction, she continues, is time. “I have these crazy anxieties, and I get freaked out, and I have, I do have impostor syndrome. And that's just very human, but also, I can do it. I've gotten this far.” Cline says. “What's the alternative? Xanax? Beta blockers?”
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Her guiding light, as of now, is January 2026, her next break, when she’ll return to LA and resume building her nest. “I’m gonna finish my garage and turn it into a screening room,” she says. Suddenly, she’s animated again, the very idea providing her with a jolt of energy. “I’ve got a whole plan.”