A scene-stealing performance. Sadie Stanley is leaving a lasting impression as one of the leads of Freeform’s Cruel Summer following a series shake-up.
The show, which debuted in April 2021, was a network hit after it introduced a story told across three timelines. Season 1 followed Kate Wallis (Olivia Holt), who was kidnapped and later rescued, and Jeanette Turner (Chiara Aurelia), who was accused of knowing the whereabouts of the missing girl.
After an explosive finale, Cruel Summer was renewed for a second season. Freeform announced in April 2022, however, that the show would become an anthology series with a new cast and showrunner.
Stanley, for her part, joined the season 2 cast alongside fellow leads Lexi Underwood and Griffin Gluck. The trio help set the scene of a friendship gone awry in a small town during the early 2000s. Ahead of the show’s return, Stanley opened up about how Cruel Summer has stuck to the narrative formula that originally brought the series success.
“They [the three timelines] worked so well, that format worked so well in the first season and it just seemed like a lot of fun as an actor to get to play three different timelines and essentially almost three different characters because our characters do change so much in each timeline,” Stanley told Nerds of Color in June 2023. “So that was really intriguing to me and I resonated with Megan a lot. She’s kind of just a regular teenage girl, but she did have to grow up really fast, because she has a single mom and a sister to take care of and got a job at an early age to help with bills and has all these big plans for her life.”
The South Carolina native went on to praise executive producer Jessica Biel for her contribution to the show.
“I am Jessica Biel’s No. 1 fan,” Stanley told The Hollywood Reporter at the time. “I think she’s one of the coolest women in the world. Not only a Y2K icon, obviously, but also just an incredible person. I’m really inspired by the way that she takes charge of her own destiny and her own career.”
The singer continued: “She said, ‘If I’m not getting cast in things that I want to be cast in, I’m just going to create them myself.’ I think that’s really, really awesome. And not only that, she’s paving the way for other young women to play really complex, interesting, flawed characters and do really cool projects. I’m so grateful for her making the space for me and Lexi to do that, and many more women after me.”
That same month, Biel elaborated on the hard work that came with starting fresh in season 2 of Cruel Summer.
“We wanted to maintain the structure and the skeleton of the show, which is the reason it’s so unique because of the timeline and the dual perspective,” she told the outlet about the multi-timeline structure. “But we wanted to change the themes this year. We’re talking even more deeply about friendship, betrayal, obsession, loyalty. How far would you go to protect somebody you love? What will you risk? Those are real world problems that adults deal with all the time, and so do young adults.”
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