Look just about anywhere on the internet and it’s clear that Sydney Sweeney drives people crazy. Not in the sense that her buxom looks have them acting like cartoon wolves, eyes bulging from faces, but in the way that her existence seems to cause many to come down with a severe case of brain worms.
Sweeney’s every move has become a talking point, often the subject of culture war skirmishes. On social media she has been branded “MAGA Barbie,” partly because of her appearance, partly because of a news report that she registered as a Republican in 2024 and partly because of her controversial ad campaign for American Eagle denim. The tagline read “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans,” a pun that some thought was advocating white supremacy. Meanwhile, her relationship with the music mogul Scooter Braun — one of the antagonists in the saga involving Taylor Swift’s catalog — has been highly scrutinized thanks to some carefully staged paparazzi photos in Central Park.
Even when her actual films come into focus, the discussion has centered on the box office (or lack thereof), not on the films themselves. Maybe that’s because to wrestle with the roles Sweeney is choosing would complicate the narrative about her. If offscreen she’s playing into her bombshell looks and catering to the male gaze, onscreen she has an almost progressive bent, gravitating toward stories of scorned women fighting the patriarchy. In that sense, Sydney Sweeney has become one of the most perplexing figures in modern cinema.
Her latest is “The Housemaid,” a deliciously over-the-top thriller directed by Paul Feig. Based on the best-selling novel by Freida McFadden, it starts as a catfight and eventually transforms into a feminist revenge fantasy. Sweeney plays Millie, a young woman with a dark past who becomes a live-in maid for a wealthy family lorded over by a seemingly perfect suburban mom (Amanda Seyfried). At first the two women are pitted against each other, with Sweeney victimized by Seyfried, her unhinged employer, but as the plot inches toward its gruesome conclusion, other themes in the text start to emerge. By the end of the movie, when it becomes clear that both women are fighting for their lives against a duplicitous charmer (Brandon Sklenar), Sweeney unleashes a ferality that’s intoxicating. It’s extremely fun to root for her bloody furor in the gleefully ruthless final act.
“The Housemaid” is being released a few months after “Christy,” Sweeney’s transformational turn as the lesbian boxer Christy Martin, who was abused by her coach and husband, Jim Martin (Ben Foster). Much has been made of how Sweeney packed on 35 pounds to portray the pioneering figure, but less has been said about her portrayal of a woman wrestling with her sexuality and living under the thumb of a brutal spouse.
Like “The Housemaid,” this is a movie about abuse — clearly a personal concern of Sweeney’s given that she has worked to raise awareness about domestic violence, including through that infamous American Eagle collaboration. Unlike “The Housemaid,” however, Sweeney’s performance in “Christy” is largely one of repression rather than rage. There’s a sadness to her take on Martin, who subsumed her identity for glory in the ring only to find personal isolation. The most triumphant moment is when she sweetly chats with her future wife (Katy O’Brian) in recovery.
Elsewhere, Sweeney has shown off her scream-queen chops with an intensely physical performance as a nun impregnated against her will by an evil priest in “Immaculate” (2024), which ends on an especially vicious note. The provocative subject matter garnered outrage on social media, and the studio even saw fit to use one angry post about Sweeney and the “anti-woke crowd” in the marketing. “Immaculate” was her second film with the director Michael Mohan, who also was behind “The Voyeurs” (2021), in which her character becomes sexually infatuated with her neighbors across the street to disastrous ends.
While those lean toward camp, Sweeney took a dramatic swing with “Reality” (2023) as Reality Winner, the former Air Force linguist who was convicted of leaking a top-secret government report on Russian hacking. Using dialogue from the transcript of Winner’s actual interrogation, Tina Satter’s docudrama featured Sweeney’s most praised performance to date, naturalistic and tightly wound. She creates a convincing portrait of someone trying to maintain normalcy under extraordinary pressure.
If Sweeney is actively trying to court conservative audiences, projects with these themes would not be the ones to pick. The same can be said for her choice to star as Kim Novak in “Scandalous!,” Colman Domingo’s coming directorial debut about the actress’s interracial romance with Sammy Davis Jr.
The image Sweeney is cultivating as a performer stands in stark contrast to the way she positions herself as a celebrity. When she’s endorsing a product, she actively plays the role of the sexpot. In May, she announced a collaboration with the men’s personal care company Dr. Squatch to sell a soap based on her bathwater. And then came the notorious American Eagle ad, entirely designed to be suggestive, with Sweeney cooing about how her “jeans are blue.” (An analysis in The New York Times indicated that initial criticism was generated by social media accounts with few followers, but right-wing voices amplified them, turning the campaign into a widespread controversy.)
But perhaps the reason Sweeney creates such discourse is that when she actually speaks up — as herself — she chooses to say very little. In an August profile for WSJ Magazine, Allie Jones wrote that Sweeney gave “the most believable performance of a cliché I have ever observed in an interview.” And indeed, Sweeney’s quotes are deathly dull. On changing her body for “Christy,” she said: “It’s so fun just not being yourself.”
Similarly, in her GQ cover interview, when she was asked about the jeans brouhaha her answers were clipped. She argued that she “didn’t really see a lot” of the reaction, and when pressed to comment on the notion that “white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority,” she responded, “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”
Months later, in an interview with People, she seemed to be in damage-control mode, saying that she doesn’t “support the views some people chose to connect to the campaign” and explaining away her earlier vagueness by pointing to her commitment “to never respond to negative or positive press.” She continued, “I have come to realize that my silence regarding this issue has only widened the divide, not closed it.”
You could argue, as some have, that Sweeney’s lack of specifics stems from a desire to hide her true feelings so as to maintain her position in an industry that leans left, and perhaps that’s the case. Or you could say that intense media training has backfired on her. Or maybe she truly hasn’t thought that hard about any of this. Regardless, it’s evident that people of all stripes can project their agendas onto her. The right-wing crowd has deemed her a hero, the left-wing one a pariah, and lost in all of this is what she’s doing in her true profession: acting.
As a performer, Sweeney is best when she’s given a challenge. Asked to play a quote-unquote normal girl in, say, the rom-com “Anyone but You” (2023), one of her biggest box office triumphs to date, she falls flat. She’s more arresting in Ron Howard’s little seen historical drama “Eden,” released quietly this year, in which she’s a woman who voyages to a remote island in the Galápagos in the early 20th century. Her German accent is rocky, but in one phenomenal scene she powers through a painful birth while a horde of barking dogs tries to attack her.
It’s her feel for heightened melodrama that also makes her captivating in “Euphoria” as the unstable Cassie, red in the face and screaming that she’s “never ever been happier” while dressed as if she’s in “Oklahoma!” She’ll return to that Emmy-nominated role when the third season premieres in April, perhaps earning her some renewed good will. (She was also nominated the same year for playing a hilariously judgmental teen in “The White Lotus,” her deadpan put to fine use.) Her most engaging work finds her shedding her naïveté to reveal either surprising willpower or roiling chaos.
Her ability to be a blank slate is why she’s a promising talent, but it’s also why it’s easy to make her a symbol for whoever you want her to be. Sweeney’s malleable persona is telling two different stories about who she really is. It all depends on which one you want to believe.
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