It’s a few hours before the evening service at Ida, a tiny family-run neighbourhood Italian in west London, and the windows are already steaming up. Outside, there’s an umbrella-buckling January downpour. Inside, though, a pure 1950s-style romance is being cooked up. Beneath the restaurant’s gallery walls, adorned with vintage Fellini posters, sit two of the brightest young actors of their generation – Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe – dressed in La Dolce Vita-esque attire, each sipping on a glass of Sangiovese and feeding each other mouthfuls of pomodoro pasta. They laugh and whisper, arms entangled, candlelight flickering. Watching from the sidelines – amid the circus of fashion rails, stylists and crew – it’s hard to believe they are not a besotted young couple.
Wool jacket and cotton/linen shirt, Celine
Polly Brown
“This is basically mine and Sadie’s entire relationship,” says a primped and preened Jupe once the camera shutters pause, laughing. The loved-up performance is all perfect prep for their forthcoming starring roles in director and playwright-of-the-moment Robert Icke’s Romeo & Juliet, opening at the Harold Pinter Theatre next month. Both actors are coming down from a whirlwind few weeks: 23-year-old Sink is reckoning with the end of Stranger Things – the televisual juggernaut to which she has dedicated almost 10 years of her life – and Jupe, 21, with his jet lag from a trip to LA for the Golden Globes, where his film, Hamnet, won big. Suffice it to say, there’s been little time to hang out. “We did a chemistry read together and that was, what, like, an hour?” Sink recalls, leaning towards Jupe for confirmation. “And then the second time we met…” “We had to do a full-on photoshoot for it,” Jupe cuts in, referring to the posters currently papering London’s billboards and Tube tunnels. They’re already finishing each other’s sentences.
Jupe and Sink will, of course, play Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet: the young, reckless lovers from feuding families whose instant, forbidden infatuation – and secret marriage – ends with their untimely and, in Icke’s view, entirely avoidable deaths. In fact, the award-winning Icke – whose latest adaptation, Oedipus, starring Lesley Manville and Mark Strong, has just wrapped up its acclaimed Broadway transfer – is less interested in the tragedy of it all than in the coincidence of them meeting in the first place. “It’s so fragile, the way the events lead to each other,” he tells me over the phone. Messages fail. Timing betrays them. “It’s the sort of play that says, ‘Well, if you stop for a coffee at the wrong time, you might miss your soulmate.’ If Romeo were to turn up at Juliet’s tomb about four minutes later, he would find her alive and they’d be absolutely fine.” It makes sense then that for this production – which will be set in a “version of now” Verona – Icke drew some of his inspiration from the 1998 cult film Sliding Doors.
