Sabrina Carpenter is talking about her closet, and I’m getting motion sickness. No, we’re not in a car—we’re on Zoom, ever heard of it? She’s spinning around on a swing in her bedroom, her laptop perched atop her hands. No, not that kind of swing. Think more the kind you maybe had in your backyard as a kid: wooden, shaped like an octagon, a huge rope running through the middle.
Technically, the 21-year-old Disney channel graduate turned fully grown-up actor is giving me the grand tour of her humble abode, all 360 degrees. “It’s a really, really, really fun party trick,” she says as she continues to rotate around the center point.
In case you were wondering (I was), the swing in question has never fallen from the ceiling (I asked). “It’s something I ordered from Urban Outfitters for, like, $50,” she tells me. “I don’t really use it very often, but everybody who comes in here does, so it’s more for them.”
The room—which is inside the Los Angeles home she owns, thank you very much—is basically every other 21-year-old’s “Interiors” Instagram collection come to life. There’s a fireplace in one corner. A cozy nook where she can listen to her records, complete with a couch and an electric piano where she can make her own music. (“If you were here, I would have played a record,” she tells me.) A black table in one corner, seemingly there solely to display her Rihanna coffee table book.
Sabrina seems like the type of girl who’s always surrounded by people. Friends who come over to use that swing or sit with her and listen to those records or watch her create covers on the electric piano in the other corner. There is a friend in the corner, actually, sort of: a cardboard cutout of Sabrina’s friend and Work It costar Liza Koshy. Liza gave it to Sabrina for her birthday, because what every girl’s bedroom needs is a life-size replica of her best friend. Especially now, in the midst of this global pandemic, when entertaining is mostly just a memory.
Sabrina’s been entertaining herself though. Writing a lot of music, which has been a “lifesaver,” decluttering her life both literally and figuratively by getting rid of physical stuff and also checking in mentally, going for runs, reading, and basically doing everything you can do without leaving the premises.
“I knew what a pandemic was but didn’t know the extent of what this was going to be for all of us,” she says. “And I think it’s garnered a lot of reflection for everybody.”
One thing she’s been reflecting on: She was two performances into starring as Cady Heron in Mean Girls on Broadway when all of Broadway abruptly shut down. With very, very little notice, she had to leave New York City and return home to Los Angeles to quarantine. She says she can’t complain, given everything else that’s going on in the world, but “that was a dream of mine for as long as I can remember. I honestly did not think that I would make it to Broadway before I was 30.”
And then there were all the other things that happened while she was dealing with the pandemic too. Her grandfather passed away in April, which meant her grandmother moved in with her and her family. She turned 21 in May, and celebrating a major milestone birthday in quarantine brought on its own wave of feelings. Then July marked the one-year anniversary of the death of her friend Cameron Boyce. So all the things that would have been incredibly hard to go through already got even harder when added to a global health crisis. Basically, she’s been going through a lot.
“It’s a crazy overwhelming feeling,” Sabrina says, slowly and with emphasis on each word. “It’s sort of like we have to go back to the basics right now, just the core things that make us feel loved and happy. We’re not distracted by all the things in the world and all the cool things that we can be doing. We’re very much forced to see the reality right now.”
Part of that reality, for Sabrina, includes work, and during the pandemic, there’s been a lot less than normal. She says she gets a little stir-crazy whenever she’s not being productive, so in the past few months, her managers have texted her regularly to make sure she’s okay on her un-busy days. Having a routine is important to her. She still does her Broadway warm-ups every day as if she’s going back tomorrow, even though she’s not.
That’s part of why she’s so excited to promote her new movie Work It, which is the reason we’re Zooming. It gives her that sense of normalcy she’s craving right now. She plays Quinn, a teen working her ass off to get into her dream school. Then the Duke recruiter she’s interviewing with tells her she needs a more unique hook to get in over all the other kids who are also incredibly smart, incredibly driven, and incredibly involved in extracurricular activities. Cue dramatic music.
Quinn decides to create her own dance team to set herself apart from the other applicants. It’s delightfully ironic because Sabrina, who’s been dancing since before she started acting and has the YouTube videos to prove it, had to pretend to be a bad dancer for more than half the movie to be able to make it work. “Dancing badly might be harder than dancing well,” she laughs.
Think of Work It as Gen Z’s Step Up, with a cast that feels a lot more reflective of what our country actually looks like. Liza, Jordan Fisher, and Keiynan Lonsdale round out the main roles, and it seems like a movie full of talent discoveries—only if you haven’t been paying attention to YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok for the past three years. Sabrina is incredibly fun to watch. She gives Quinn the kind of transformation that will remind you of the ’90s teen movies that fill you with nostalgic feels even if you were, um, a lil bb in the ’90s.
Sabrina also executive-produced the movie, which, at first, she was skeptical about. She didn’t know exactly how much she was going to be allowed to do, but she ended up having “so much” input on the characters and the music in the movie and it made for an environment where everyone felt they had a say. “That’s why there was so much laughter on-set, because it was just a very fun, collaborative, not stressful environment, which is rare in a lot of scenarios,” she says. Before you ask, she didn’t say which scenario she was throwing this subtle shade at, but knowing Hollywood, she’s probably experienced more than one.
That’s probably because she has been acting since she was 11ish and has more screen credits than you can count. (And don’t forget the four albums she’s put out.) She knows the industry intimately. And for a girl who had her first major career successes on Disney (or as she calls it, “the D word”), it can be hard to shake the stigma that comes with being a child actor.
The idea that people would think of her as less talented or less deserving or less worthy or less whatever because she was on a show made for kids that happened to be distributed by a certain platform is what bothers her. She’ll probably get comments about that for the rest of her life, she tells me. People box her in. But projects like this one, where she’s not just a presence in front of the camera but also behind it, making decisions every step of the way, definitely help.
That reflecting she mentioned before? This is where that comes in. The past few months, sitting mostly alone in the home she’s created for herself, have made her think about what she wants next. She hopes fans can see her for who she is now. Like, the real her, the adult her.
“Who I am today is who I am,” she says. “And I think it’s a much healthier mindset. Just be with people as they are in that moment and appreciate them for who they are in that moment.”
It might take the world, and her fans, a while to catch up with who she is now. But until then, you can probably find her on that bedroom swing, a hint of the carefree bliss of childhood in an otherwise very adult place.
Photographer: Sarah Carpenter. Associate Creative Producer: Ruben Chamorro. Hair and Makeup: Jill Powell. Writer/Entertainment Editor: Emma Baty. Creative Director: Abby Silverman. Fashion Director: Cassie Anderson. Beauty Director: Julee Wilson. Entertainment Director: Maxwell Losgar. Senior Visuals Editor: Raydene Salinas Hansen. Supervising Producer: Abbey Adkison. Post Supervising Producer: Heather Weyrick. Editor: Amanda Evans.
On Sabrina: Pearls look: Marc Jacobs top, pants, and necklace. Brinker & Eliza earrings. L. Erickson headband. Jimmy Choo heels. Gold dress look: Gucci dress. Jennifer Behr earrings. L. Erickson headband. Roger Vivier boots. Plaid look: Miu Miu top, pants, and heels. Lele Sadoughi earrings. Black bodysuit look: Dior bodysuit, hat, belt, and bracelet. Falke tights. Manolo Blahnik heels. Black and white dress look: Miu Miu dress. Kenneth Jay Lane earrings. White dress look: Adeam dress and headband. Bumblebee Linens parasol. Tights look: Calzedonia tights. Jennifer Behr headband.
