The week that I called up Sabrina Carpenter to discuss her new Netflix rom-com Work It, a scene from her days on the Disney Channel series Girl Meets World was circulating on Twitter, where people were dragging it for its portrayal of communism.
Sabrina doesn’t remember the exact scene off the top of her head (she hasn’t been on Twitter in weeks), but she says she can “imagine” what went on. After all, it’s not the first time Sabrina has seen an old moment make the rounds anew. She’s grown used to the idea that not everything from the show, a reboot of Boy Meets World that ran from 2014-2017, is aging well.
“I troll myself daily when people tag me in clips from that show,” Sabrina tells Teen Vogue. “It's funny because in the moment, that was my world and that was my everything and I was so proud to be a part of it and everything that it stood for. I definitely would have done some things different had I been doing it now, but I think the beauty of the show was that we really were at the age that we were playing and we were coming into ourselves as we were playing characters that were coming into themselves.”
Now, Sabrina is 21 years old, with a decade of experience in the entertainment industry. She has four pop albums, a slew of roles in both critically-acclaimed dramas (most recently, The Short History of the Long Road) and lighter comedic fare (Tall Girl, Work It), and a stint on Broadway under her belt as Cady Heron in Mean Girls (cut short when COVID-19 caused theatres to close).
With those experiences — including in that famously filtered, controlled Disney Channel environment — shaping her past, Sabrina is continuing to build the future of her career and is taking charge of crafting her own image and trajectory.
“I think I was born somebody that really wants to control my narrative and knows that in the end, the choices that I make now are choices that will affect me later and long term,” Sabrina says. “And I don't want to be living with somebody else's choices.”
Work It, out on Netflix August 7, is a movie about choices, the latest in a string of Netflix originals to tackle Senior Year (The F*ck It List, The Kissing Booth). Sabrina plays Quinn, a 4.0-wielding A/V club type with a single-minded focus on attending the college her late father went to, Duke University. When the admissions counselor tells her she doesn’t stand out, she lies about being part of her high school’s renowned dance team, the Thunderbirds. The kicker, of course, is that she can’t dance and that the leader of the Thunderbirds (played by Keiynan Lonsdale) actively hates her for ruining a past performance.
Chaos and choreo montages ensue as Quinn asks her best friend Jasmine (Liza Koshy) to leave the Thunderbirds and help her start her own group with misfits and untrained dancers from their school. They enlist famed young choreographer Jake Taylor (Jordan Fisher) to prepare them for the end-of-year dance competition; he helps Quinn realize there’s more to dance than memorizing body movement, and there’s more to Quinn than trying to fulfill her mom’s expectations.
Work It has big-picture takeaways, but it’s also a lighthearted dance rom-com, exactly the genre Sabrina says she enjoyed as a kid in Pennsylvania who actually was taking dance classes six days a week. “I grew up wishing that I was in them and wishing that Channing Tatum was dipping me,” she says. “Dirty Dancing's a classic, obviously. Honey. Center Stage. The Step Up movies are probably my favorite if I had to choose, especially Moose from Step Up 2, my heart belongs to him.”
She’s also a rom-com fan generally, citing her close friend Joey King’s recently released Kissing Booth sequel and how Sabrina has now joined her in the Netflix rom-com lead canon.
“It's just so funny for both of us because we feel like we're constantly living parallel lives, and [then] our movies are coming out two weeks apart from each other,” she says. “It's such a gift to be able to support your friends in everything that they're doing but to have a friend that really knows exactly what you're doing and is going through the same things as you at the same time is really special. So yeah, I like her and whatever.”
Earlier in the summer, Sabrina starred in the drama The Short History of the Long Road. She plays Nola, a teen who lives on the road with her father in an RV, and who has to carry on alone and homeless after he dies. Nola is a different kind of character than what fans may be used to seeing Sabrina take on, but she sees all her roles as existing for distinct reasons.
“People that need a little bit of light and a little bit of energy and inspiration and hope can watch a movie like Work It and feel good and laugh with their friends,” she says. “People that are looking for a bit of a wake-up call or a bit of kind of assurance that they're not alone, there’s Short History.”
She mentions The Hate U Give, the YA book adaptation that has seen renewed interest in the past few months for its commentary on police brutality and embedded racism. In that film, she plays Starr Carter’s (Amandla Stenberg) racist longtime friend Hailey.
“I've seen it be a must-read in school. I've seen it also be banned in other schools, which is very interesting and says a lot about what we're still dealing with,” Sabrina says. “[With anti-racism efforts now,] it’s definitely more of a conscious effort to make sure that [these issues] aren’t a trend. It doesn't just come in and out when it's ‘relevant.’ It is something that we are integrating into our everyday lives, that these conversations are things that are ongoing and that need to keep being had.”
Reflecting on Hailey now, Sabrina says she’s “proud to play a character that can maybe be a mirror for some people, as harsh as that may seem.”
“I think it's important to play those characters just as much as it is to play the down to earth, fun-loving, go-lucky kind of girls,” she says. “Because people will see themselves in each one, and then hopefully take something from it.”
While she continues to develop as an actor, Sabrina is also progressing as a musician and songwriter. Her most recent concept, Singular Acts I and II, was completed in 2019; she’s proven she knows how to pull off an underrated, crisply-crafted bop, as with “Sue Me” and “Paris.” She’s since been writing and sharing songs on Instagram, such as “April Fool,” a soft piano ballad accented with her sultry soprano.
She recently compared her evolving music ideology to Taylor Swift’s disclaimer for folklore — to stop overthinking the release schedule — and tells Teen Vogue that dropping a snippet like “April Fool” isn’t something she’d typically do. Things are different now. “Nothing is certain and nothing is guaranteed,” she says. “We do what we want. Lyrically and just emotionally, I've been through a lot in the last six months, as we all have.” She’s always writing, though maybe for a more nebulous reason than a planned single or official album. “I'm never not thinking about what that next thing is going to be.”
As a first-time producer on “Work It,” Sabrina is now thinking about how she wants to keep digging her hands into the brainstorming and crafting aspects of the projects she chooses to be involved in. Each new endeavor is an opportunity for education, for growth.
“It’s so hard at this age to actually trust ourselves and our opinions and our ideas because we're constantly feeling like, ‘Oh, I'm too young to notice.’ Or, "I don't have enough experience to be confident in this,’” she says. “And it's like, no, but that's how we learn.”
And what’s learning without being able to laugh at where we’ve come from? To acknowledge all the different versions of ourselves we used to be before now? Sabrina says she and her sisters have made a game for when they watch old episodes of Girl Meets World, which has a few variations depending on the mood. “Especially after my 21st birthday, I was like, ‘I need to take a shot every time my character says this and watch Girl Meets World,” she laughs. They’ll also play “Spot Sarah” and take a drink of lemonade every time her older sister appears on screen as an extra (which is constantly, apparently).
“I've created friendships from that show that'll last a lifetime,” she says. “I can't really go back and wish that I could change too much, because it was real.”
CREDITS
Photographer: Sarah Carpenter
Fashion Director: Tahirah Hairston
Art Director: Emily Zirimis
Hair: Scott King
Makeup: Allan Avedano
Stylist: Jason Bolden
