Sydney Sweeney Is More Than Meets the Eye

When Sydney Sweeney hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time earlier this month, it was a fairly lackluster affair. With the exception of an amusing sketch in which cast member Bowen Yang was “revealed” to be straight and in turn seduced Sweeney, the episode will go down as barely a footnote in the annals of SNL. Conversely, there was plenty of attention paid to Sweeney’s appearance on the show. Conservative commentators latched on to a harebrained narrative that Sweeney’s cleavage was meant to own the libs; in fact, one of the biggest national newspapers in Canada ran an op-ed with the lede “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” (We live in cursed times.)

Another meaningless debate about wokeness is one thing; it’s even weirder when the conversation is centered on someone’s body. It’s a phenomenon that Sweeney is familiar with. As she joked in her SNL monologue, she’s known as “the girl on TV who screams, cries, and has sex—sometimes all three at the same time.” Seeing as most of the episode poked fun at the hyperfixation on Sweeney’s attractiveness, the ensuing news cycle felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy. “People feel connected and free to be able to speak about me in whatever way they want, because they believe that I’ve signed my life away,” Sweeney recently explained in an interview with Variety. “It’s this weird relationship that people have with me that I have no control or say over.”

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Of course, it’s always been reductive to diminish Sweeney to the most salacious elements of her TV roles. Though her portrayal of Cassie Howard in HBO’s Euphoria, which premiered in 2019, is widely credited for putting Sweeney on the map, it was a trio of performances from the previous year that first demonstrated her acting chops. Between supporting roles in Netflix’s short-lived dramedy Everything Sucks!, Hulu’s Emmy-winning drama The Handmaid’s Tale, and the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects, Sweeney conveyed the kind of intensity and vulnerability that’s since become her calling card. Throw in her performance as Olivia Mossbacher in the first season of The White Lotus—a character whose mix of ruthlessness and insecurity puts Regina George to shame—and it’s clear that there are few actors from Sweeney’s generation who are better at capturing teen angst. (FYI, Cassie has never, ever been happier.)

But since Sweeney’s previous roles have had a shorter shelf life—Everything Sucks! was canceled after one season, her character is tragically killed in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Sharp Objects and The White Lotus were one-offs—Euphoria has inevitably loomed large over the rest of her young career. And despite the plaudits that Sweeney has received for Euphoria, including an Emmy nomination in 2022, there’s always a sense that the work is somewhat overshadowed by all the attention paid to Cassie’s nude scenes. “This is something that has bothered me for a while,” Sweeney told The Independent in 2022. “I’m very proud of my work in Euphoria. I thought it was a great performance. But no one talks about it because I got naked.”

But as Sweeney has parlayed her success on television into starring roles in film, an interesting through line has emerged: Rather than shy away from how she’s being sexualized, she’s embraced it in clever ways. In the Amazon Studios original movie The Voyeurs, Sweeney plays Pippa, an early-career optometrist who moves in with her boyfriend, Thomas (Justice Smith), before they begin spying on their attractive, exhibitionist neighbors across the street. (Basically, imagine if Rear Window were extremely horny.) Erotic thrillers have practically gone extinct in the 21st century, so the existence of The Voyeurs was titillating in and of itself. But aside from its pulpy pleasures, The Voyeurs can also be read as Sweeney’s attempt to take agency over her sexuality. In the opening scene of the film, the camera spies on Pippa through a department store window as she’s trying on lingerie in a dressing room. Suddenly, she makes direct eye contact and closes the curtain: a cheeky meta-commentary on the bizarre fascination that some people have with Sweeney’s body.

Sweeney is subject to a different kind of gaze in HBO Films’ Reality, a drama centered on the FBI interrogation of whistleblower Reality Winner, who leaked a classified NSA report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. All of Reality’s dialogue is taken straight from the FBI transcript—even the little moments when characters stammer over their words or have a coughing fit—and the result is an incredibly unnerving tale of entrapment. Sweeney has also never been better: Whether attempting to deflect from the FBI’s search of her home with small talk about her pets or dealing with the invasion of her personal space by a physically imposing agent, she channels Reality’s creeping dread with little more than her mannerisms. It’s a performance that asks a lot of her even if it seems like she’s doing very little—practically the antithesis of what she’s known for on Euphoria. Make no mistake: Even if it was a streaming release, Reality was the surest sign yet of Sweeney’s movie star bona fides.

Naturally, the tried-and-true star-making roles soon followed. The romantic comedy has also fallen out of favor lately, but Sweeney did her part to revive the genre with Anyone but You, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. In the film, Sweeney plays Bea, a law student at Boston College who hits it off with Ben (Glen Powell), a charming finance bro—if such a thing even exists. A misunderstanding after their first night together leads Bea and Ben to sour on each other; as fate would have it, they’re both later whisked away as guests of a destination wedding in Australia. If not entirely novel, Anyone but You knew how to play the hits: The chemistry between Sweeney and Powell was strong enough to spark rumors of an affair, the raunchy humor was (mostly) effective, and the cast endearingly sings Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” over the end credits. (Hot take: All movies should end with a cast sing-along.) Best of all, Anyone but You emerged as a sleeper hit at the box office: a potent reminder that Hollywood shouldn’t put all its eggs in the blockbuster basket.

Of course, the path to modern stardom often makes a pitstop in the world of superheroes, and Sweeney was no exception, having been cast as Julia Cornwall (a.k.a. Spider-Woman) in Sony’s Madame Web. Well, uh, about that: The bottom has finally dropped out of the superhero-industrial complex, and all the ridicule aimed at Madame Web feels like an extinction-level event for the dominance of these types of movies. The only consolation for Sweeney is that she came out of Madame Web relatively unscathed: Of all the issues plaguing this film, her muted performance isn’t anywhere near the top of the list. (I’m still stuck on the fact that Dakota Johnson used an entire press tour to trash her own movie, and that virtually all of the villain’s dialogue was dubbed over.)

Besides, the best way to wash away the stench of a bad movie is by having another project waiting in the wings. Which brings us to Immaculate, Sweeney’s first real stab at a horror film, which premieres on Friday. Immaculate begins when an American nun, Cecilia (Sweeney), transfers to a convent in rural Italy after her parish closes down. Shortly after arriving, Cecilia becomes pregnant: a discovery that could be a divine miracle, or something more nefarious. (It’s a horror flick, so you can guess where this is headed.)

A reunion between Sweeney and The Voyeurs director Michael Mohan, Immaculate is another project that weaponizes the audience’s perception of Sweeney—this time to make a larger point about bodily autonomy. As soon as Cecilia’s pregnancy is confirmed, she’s treated less like a person than a vessel. At one point, after a jealous nun attempts to drown her, all of the convent’s leaders gather around and celebrate that the fetus came away from the attack unscathed. “But I’m not OK,” Cecilia says, a plea that those around her dismiss. The sense that the community cares about Cecilia’s body more than they care about Cecilia herself is also reflected in how Mohan frames Sweeney: The camera is often leering as a bunch of religious leaders—predominantly men—try to assume ownership over her choices. With how the movie ends—a brutal, bloody climax that cements Sweeney’s aspirations as a next-gen scream queen—Immaculate may well be the first film about a nun that feels explicitly pro-choice.

If nothing else, Immaculate couldn’t have arrived at a better time: Just as a bunch of conservatives weirdly obsess over Sweeney’s body, a movie is doing the same by design. More importantly, Immaculate is further proof that Sweeney is making some of the most interesting career choices of any up-and-comer in Hollywood. Rather than being pigeonholed, she has done a bit of everything in recent years: an erotic thriller, a rom-com, a claustrophobic chamber piece that pulls from an actual FBI transcript, a superhero blockbuster, and now, a horror movie. It’s almost enough to make Euphoria seem like an afterthought. In any case, whether she’s in a prestige drama or a project for the big screen, Sweeney has established herself as a star on the rise—one who’s more than meets the eye.