"We didn’t do a lot of takes": Hailee Steinfeld recalls filming this intense sequence from Sinners

Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) is seen doing a slow dance in the joint in Sinners
Hailee Steinfeld as Mary in Sinners

Hailee Steinfeld, one of the female leads in Warner Bros.’ horror hit Sinners, recently opened up about filming a scene that has fans buzzing. Opposite Michael B. Jordan, who plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack, Steinfeld described the experience of shooting what many are calling a scene that was simply too hot to handle.

The scene in question is when Stack and Hailee Steinfeld's character, Mary, reunites, and she expresses her anger (which is also love speaking) towards him. She says, while appearing in a recent interview in Variety's Awards Circuit podcast, that,

It was the first thing Michael [B. Jordan] and I shot together. I thought I needed time with him, with Ryan [Coogler], to build rapport. But it actually worked out — by then, our characters had lived some of the memories we refer to in the film. It was almost like we did it in reverse, but in a great way. We were fighting light like crazy that day, so we didn’t do a lot of takes. The camera was rolling as long as it could, getting as much as possible before the mag ran out. I definitely didn’t expect that line — or any of Mary’s lines — to explode the way they did. But there it is.

Hailee Steinfeld's dialogue in the scene goes like this

"I heard you loud and clear, but then you stuck your tongue in my cooze and fucked me so hard I figured you changed your mind."

Warner Bros. has released three horror films in 2025, and Sinners is currently the most successful out of them. It made $367 million at the global box office, while the other two, Final Destination Bloodlines and Weapons, made $314 million and $266 million, respectively.


What happens to Hailee Steinfeld's character in Sinners?

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Hailee Steinfeld's character is a lover of Stack, and in the movie, she becomes a vampire as soon as she meets Remmick (Jack O'Connell), an Irish Vampire.

However, she isn't killed, but she does bite Stack and makes him a vampire too. Stack's twin brother, Smoke, tries to kill her after she is turned, but she manages to escape from the place.

It's obvious that if they have become vampires now, Mary and Stack have become immortal, though it comes with certain conditions.

In the final moments of the film, both Mary and Stack meet an elderly Sammie, who is played by Buddy Guy, and a younger version is played by Miles Caton. They offer him immortality, but Sammie refuses. And as they leave, Stack tells him it was the last time he saw the sun or his brother Smoke.

Ryan Coogler, the film's director, helped make this character easy for her to play. In an interview she gave to Refinery29 just before the movie was released,

A lot of [my portrayal of Mary] had to do with Coogler. The way that he wrote her and the conversations he had [helped] guide me to play this character that lived in both worlds.

She also discovered a great deal about her family history while researching for the role, as she revealed in the same interview. For her role in the movie, Hailee Steinfeld won the Astra Midseason Movie Award for Best Supporting Actress.

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Edited by Tanisha Aggarwal