FROM COAST TO COAST

An only child who was home-schooled from middle school until college, Cline grew up across from a church in Goose Creek, South Carolina, with a real estate mom and engineer dad. “It was very quiet,” she says of her home life. “When we’re all together, we’ll sit in the living room, and my mom and I will do a puzzle, and my dad will watch TV.

“We don't even have to say anything, we’ll kind of grunt at each other,” she laughs, mimicking the sound. “We don’t have to talk. So I think I credit that to being a bit of an introvert or a bit of a homebody.”

When she took an interest in acting and modeling, Cline’s parents were on board, excited to see their daughter break out of her shell. They also saw it as an investment in her future, a way for her to save money for college. But Cline’s time at Coastal Carolina University was brief, before she dropped out to move to Los Angeles and pursue acting full time. The following years proved to be fruitful, but they also came with sacrifices. 

“Thinking about that time now, I’m like, that was so f------ scary,” Cline says, lowering her voice. She explains that when she decided to take acting seriously, she lost touch with hometown friends. Pulling out her phone, she taps furiously, looking for lyrics to a Taylor Swift song that reminds her of that time in her life. (She’s a self-described Swiftie.) 

“In ‘You’re on Your Own, Kid’ she sings, ‘My friends from home don’t know what to say,’” Cline recites, looking up from her phone. “I think sometimes they were confused as to why I cared so much or —” she pauses, carefully choosing her words. “I don’t think they understood why I was doing it. …You’re lucky if you get to keep your long-term friends. I do still have some friends back home, and we catch up every now and again. But you know, they’re doing their thing elsewhere.”

These days, when she’s not working, you’re more likely to catch Cline with her rumored boyfriend, musician Jackson Guthy. The two were first photographed together last summer, but they have yet to publicly speak about their linked ties. Despite my observations of a black-and-white photo of a couple on her phone’s lock screen and Cline’s use of “we” when talking about her life, she makes it clear to me that she’s at a point where she wants to keep her private life, well … private. 

It’s a decision she’s made after sudden fame came with the public’s interest in her love life — particularly her relationship with her “Outer Banks” co-star, Stokes, which ended in November 2021, per Entertainment Weekly. Coincidently, just hours before our interview, the magazine published an article with statements from both actors about working together post-breakup.

“We had a working relationship before we had a personal relationship, and our job from day one has always been to leave the show better than we found it,” Cline told EW.

But for our interview, Cline emphasizes that she’s now carefully considering “what not to share with the world, and what to keep personal.”

She adds that her past relationship “happened to be on a stage, but it taught me a lot about myself and what I want and also about, again, learning what I want to keep for myself…the things that I want to be selfish about.”

She brings her crossed legs up to her chest, apprehensive. “Some people can do it — I can’t,” she continues. “If you give everything — like, 100% of your energy — away, where’s the rest for yourself? You finally understand why people in the public eye keep their circles small.

“I realized there are parts of my life that only me or one other person are entitled to. I prefer it that way. It also just makes things more special. That’s usually how relationships are.”

BEYOND THE BANKS

Hard-earned lessons about relationships aside, Cline describes her life as “truly a dream.” With a scroll through her Instagram — followed by more than 13.6 million people — it certainly appears that way; her posts feature her on red carpets and gracing magazine covers. But there are tiny glimpses of her personal life, shared via the ever-so-Gen Z “photo dump,” a carousel of candid, unedited photos that sum up a person’s recent life. 

Whether it’s from millions of Netflix viewers or millions of social media followers, Cline has been open about experiencing imposter syndrome, including after being cast in “Glass Onion.” And of course, as one of the leads in a TV show where she’s often filmed in a bathing suit, she also has to grapple with the physical expectations that are thrown her way. When it comes to her relationship with wellness and body image, she says it’s “a personal journey.”

“I can feel myself slipping sometimes into calorie counting or whatever, and I have to pull myself back from that,” she says. “Having a deeply personal relationship like that with yourself and body, being objectified, it almost puts a flashlight on it. It's a deeply personal relationship, and it’s a day-in, day-out thing. It’s not like, ‘OK, fixed it. We're good today. It’s going to be great every day onward.’ It’s an ongoing journey.”

She adds: “The main goal is staying healthy. And healthy doesn’t necessarily always look like eating kale. It just means you’re feeding your body, and you’re giving your body what it needs. My journey with my body got a lot healthier when I started to acknowledge and be thankful for what it puts me through.”

At 25, one might argue that Cline’s journey is just beginning. Here she is, on the precipice of becoming a bonafide household name. So what does a person do when the top is within her reach?

Well, when you’re Madelyn Cline and quite literally at the top of a ladder at a TODAY photo shoot, you get creative and start doing a one-legged yoga pose. Figuratively, though, she’s focused on what’s in front of her — and that means gearing up for the third season of “Outer Banks,” streaming Feb. 23. 

At the end of Season Two, the Pogues were once again running for their lives. The Season Three trailer released earlier this month shows the group washing up on a deserted island, yet still being hunted down as they try to find another treasure. As Cline says, the writers just keep “raising the stakes.” 

“I want everybody to go along for the ride, because I know everybody watches for the ‘ships.’ The ‘will they, won’t they,’” she teases about Sarah and John B’s romantic future. “So I'm going to leave that there, but it is a journey, and it is a wild one.”

She quickly adds with a giggle, “And it’s not boring. I will say that.”

As for whether “OBX” has a future beyond this third season, Cline is leaving the door wide open. 

“We haven’t gotten picked up for a fourth,” she says. “But I don’t think it’s going to be the last. I think there's more of the story to be told.”

THE NEXT BIG THING

Cline is eager to build her growing foundation as an actor. But filming “Outer Banks” does mean she’s “off the market” for a big chunk of the year, and must navigate offers that come her way depending on her “OBX” schedule.

“It is gratifying when you see and read scripts that come through,” she says. “I am so excited that I’m even being considered, just to even be in the conversation.”

As actors, she says, “We’re always looking for the next thing that’s exciting to us, that sparks that, ‘Oh, f---, I want to be a part of it!’ But right now, I’m just enjoying riding this ‘Outer Banks’ press tour, enjoying the experience and fully being able to digest what it looks like in the normal world. The experience that I didn’t have the first time during the pandemic, I'm getting to fully get this time.”

As our time winds down, both of us are still sitting on the floor, Cline’s Ugg boots stretched in front of her leaning in opposite directions. She tells me she’d sworn to herself she’d never reveal the role she wished she would have landed years ago — but when asked, she doesn’t stop herself. “It was a long time before ‘Outer Banks,’ but I went out for ‘Bumblebee,’” she says of the 2018 Hailee Steinfeld-led action film. “I was like, ‘Transformers,’ this is so cool!’ But it didn’t happen,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “There have been a lot of almosts."

In the future, she would like to do a period piece and says she really has “the bug for action-adventure — obviously because of ‘Outer Banks,’” she says. “And I really, really enjoyed stylized filmmaking like Rian’s. I’d love to do something more like that.”

In the meantime, Cline says you can catch her sipping a martini; on a Friday night, she says she’s either decompressing or going all out.

“It depends on the Friday. Like this Friday night, I’m gonna go get an IV (drip), and I’m probably going to knock out,” she says. “It has been such a jam-packed week, and I’m so excited to not set an alarm. But if we rewind to, let’s say, last week, you could find us going to a dive bar: dinner and a dive bar, drinking beers and playing pool.”