Stranger Things Fans Are Disappointed Over Sadie Sink’s Emmy Snub

Another Emmys season invariably means another round of snubs. This year, the 74th Emmy Awards nomination list included a number of nods for shows like White Lotus, Severance, and Only Murders in the Building, along with actors like Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey and Euphoria’s Zendaya. Meanwhile, Netflix’s Stranger Things got a whopping 13 nominations in categories like production design, hairstyling, and prosthetics. What wasn’t included was a single acting nod, which has disappointed fans of the sci-fi horror series — many of whom were hoping for, at the very least, Sadie Sink to get a nod for her role as Max Mayfield.

While she played a supporting role before, Sink really took center stage in Season 4 as Max was targeted by the villain Vecna. Her death sentence was the focus of the emotional fourth episode, “Dear Billy,” which saw Max writing goodbye letters to her friends and family, including her dead brother, Billy. The episode culminated in Max nearly getting killed by Vecna, but she was able to snap out of his trance thanks to Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” song. The scene resonated so strongly with viewers that it catapulted Bush’s ‘80s song back to the top of the charts, and the song has since been trending and used in over two million TikToks.

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Sink told Vulture she was “very young and insecure” when she first joined the cast, and she never imagined Max would play such an integral role on the ensemble show. “To be at this point on the show where I was lucky enough to have this plotline and have a character with such great development, and to see fans reacting to that in such a positive way, has been very rewarding,” she said. “I mean, I always felt like the new kid. To have this for Max, showing where her strength is and her perseverance, was a proud moment for me and something I didn’t realize would happen while I was filming it.”

Fans React To Sadie Sink’s Emmy Snub

Max’s journey in Stranger Things 4 is so traumatic and heart-wrenching that many believe Sink deserves recognition. Fans sounded off on Twitter to share their disappointment over this surprising snub.

Many fans also believed that Sink deserved to be nominated alongside costars Millie Bobby Brown and Caleb McLaughlin, who each had their own emotional arcs as Eleven and Lucas, respectively. “[They] deserved an Emmy nomination for this scene alone,” one fan tweeted, referring to Max’s final death scene, which sees Eleven and Lucas trying to comfort Max in her final moments and then sobbing over her body.

Instead, the nominations for supporting actress in a drama series went to Patricia Arquette (Severance), Julia Garner (Ozark), Jung Ho-yeon (Squid Game), Christina Ricci (Yellowjackets), Rhea Seehorn (Better Caul Saul), J. Smith-Cameron (Succession), Sarah Snook (Succession), and Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria). To date, only Millie Bobby Brown and David Harbour have been nominated in an acting category for Stranger Things.