Madelyn Cline remembers the exact moment she realized she was famous.
It was during COVID, and she was at LAX, standing in the security line for a flight to South Carolina, where she was about to start shooting season two of Outer Banks, the soapy, sun-soaked teen treasure hunt series that was, back in 2020, just starting to break out as one of Netflix’s hottest epidemic-era hits.
Cline was fully masked and wearing a hat, but somehow got recognized anyway — seemingly, by everyone. Suddenly, while wheeling her carry-on up to the TSA checkpoint, she noticed that the other travelers in the terminal had turned to stare at her, like in a scene from a paranoid sci-fi thriller.
“You kind of gain Spidey senses — you can sense when people are watching or taking pictures,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter. “But when I was in line at security, all of a sudden I just felt really self-conscious. I felt like I was in one of those dreams where I’d gone to school and forgotten my clothes. I felt naked. That wasn’t something I’d ever felt before.”
Today, at 28, Cline has grown accustomed to people staring at her at airports — and pretty much everywhere else. After six years of outrunning smugglers, hunting buried gold, and generally looking spectacular in various states of maritime distress, playing Sarah Cameron on Outer Banks has made her one of Netflix’s most famous faces — or at least one of its most algorithmically inescapable.
