Sydney Sweeney doesn’t get why you’re obsessed with her: “I’m just being me”

Knowing hyperbole is the language of the internet, but when fans post that “Sydney Sweeney is the moment”, it’s barely an exaggeration. Her breakthrough role in Euphoria, as the deeply damaged people-pleaser Cassie Howard, made her a Gen Z icon when the bleakly brilliant teen drama debuted in 2019.

“As an actor, she’s a dream to play because she goes through so much,” Sweeney says. It’s a fair assessment of a character whose storyline checklist over two seasons (so far) includes revenge porn, abortion, abandonment trauma and more. “And she has unlocked so much for me,” Sweeney adds. “She’s made me more confident as an actor, but also as a person.”

In 2021, Sweeney scored another TV triumph when she played smart, snarky rich girl Olivia Mossbacher in the first season of The White Lotus. It was another pivotal role, Sweeney says, because it changed “everyone’s opinions of me just being Cassie”. When NME says that Olivia feels like a girl we all went to school with, she replies: “That is exactly how I got into the mindset. I knew a few people that I drew from, but also [creator] Mike White’s writing is so flawless that he somehow can speak the language of every character he’s writing for.”

Since then, Sweeney has levelled up again. Last year, she earned rave reviews for her captivating performance in the intimate true-crime film Reality; she played Reality Winner, a translator interrogated by the FBI after leaking documents pertaining to Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. She also starred in The Rolling Stones‘ ‘Angry’ music video. “The moment I saw the car and they told me that I’d be doing whatever I wanted standing on top of a car driving down Sunset [Boulevard], I was like, ‘I am in,'” she says.

But perhaps most impressively of all, she is now producing her own movies including last year’s blockbuster romcom Anyone But You and Immaculate, a nerve-shredding psychological horror film which comes out on Friday (March 22). “I really love being part of the entire process – from conceptualising the project to building the team, putting it together for production, then editing and releasing it,” the 26-year-old says. Immaculate‘s director Michael Mohan says the reason Sweeney seems so “in touch with what people want” is because “she makes the kinds of movies she herself wants to see”.

Ahead of this interview, Sweeney has been pinging between her LA home and promo trips to New York, Paris and Austin, where Immaculate premiered at beleaguered arts festival South By Southwest on March 12. But she doesn’t seem remotely frazzled when she appears on Zoom, dressed casually in front of pretty floral wallpaper while her “rescue mutt” Tank plays off camera.

Quite the opposite: she has a calm confidence and clearly knows how to speak teasingly about projects she can’t give concrete updates on. She recently said Euphoria is “like home when I go back to it” but won’t be drawn today on when her home visit for season three might begin. “Um, I don’t know how soon I’m going home,” she says with a playful cadence in her voice. “I’m just doing all the press for Immaculate right now and then we’ll see.”

She’s also funny within seconds of the interview kicking off. When we say her schedule has been “wild” the last couple of weeks, she replies quick as a flash: “It’s been wild the last couple of years.” Sweeney also showed her sense of humour earlier this month when she hosted Saturday Night Live and poked fun at Madame Web, the drubbed and unloved superhero movie released in February that she has a supporting role in. It’s a rare flop on her CV but at this point hardly seems likely to halt her forward momentum.

“I’m never nervous. If I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do it 100 per cent”

“You might have seen me in Anyone But You or Euphoria,” Sweeney said in her SNL monologue, before adding with a smile: “You definitely did not see me in Madame Web.” Was she nervous before delivering that line? “No… I’m never nervous. If I’m gonna do something, I’m gonna do it 100 per cent,” she says.

She definitely goes in 100 per cent on Immaculate, a twisty chiller that showcases the electrifying intensity of her acting – especially at its climax, when Sweeney’s gaslit nun makes a gut-churning decision – and her growing clout as a producer. Sweeney first auditioned for the film when she was 16, didn’t get the role, but couldn’t get it out of her head even as the project stalled in development hell.

“The character’s journey was just such a wild stretch of an arc that I hadn’t read and still didn’t read in the last 10 years [since the initial audition],” she says. “She finds layers in herself that she didn’t even know she was capable of. As an actor, it’s really cool to find those places [that] you don’t know if you’re capable of either.”

When the film begins, Sweeney’s character Sister Cecilia is a pious but slightly passive American nun trying to adapt to a new life at an opulent but spooky Italian convent. When Cecilia falls pregnant even though she’s still a virgin, the nuns’ leader Father Sal (Money Heist‘s Álvaro Morte) declares it an immaculate conception. Cecilia becomes the convent’s prize asset, but the supposed miracle soon turns nightmarish in ways that will make viewers wince.

Sweeney, a “huge fan” of the genre, says she was also determined to get Immaculate made because she liked the way it “paid homage to old horror films from the ’70s”. So, she acquired the rights to the script, teamed up with The White Lotus producer David Bernad, and brought in a director she had worked with before: Michael Mohan.

Mohan co-created the underrated 2018 Netflix teen series Everything Sucks!, which gave Sweeney her first major TV role a year before Euphoria, and also directed her in the 2021 erotic thriller film The Voyeurs. Together, they reworked Immaculate‘s script to make Cecilia a twentysomething nun instead of a convent schoolgirl. “That way we got the full landscape of what Sydney’s capable of,” he explains. “She begins so meek and mild-mannered and we watch her turn into this, like, feral creature covered in blood.”

“I like to play characters who have a lot of baggage”

Sweeney’s creative vision also drove forward Anyone But You, the charmingly old-school romcom which has grossed $212million globally since it opened in December. She and Top Gun: Maverick‘s Glen Powell play characters who pretend to be a couple at a destination wedding, then end up falling for each other in a way that hits the genre’s familiar beats flawlessly. The film’s unexpected success could be a game-changer for the genre, which in recent years has been relegated to cheap streaming fodder.

As the movie’s executive producer, Sweeney hired romcom veteran Will Gluck (Friends With Benefits) to direct, which got the studio “really excited”, but found it “really hard” to cast her co-star. “A lot of male actors don’t want to do a romcom,” she says. “Glenn was down – he loves romcoms and does such a great job in it. And so it was my job as a producer to get the studio on board to hire him.” Were other male actors put off by the genre’s reduced reputation? “I think so, but now everyone wants to do a romcom,” she says with a laugh.

Sweeney flew to Australia to shoot Anyone But You the day after wrapping Immaculate in Rome. It sounds like a potential headfuck, but Sweeney says she has always been able to “shut out” a character as soon as the director calls cut. “I’ve had to because I like to play characters who have a lot of baggage,” she says matter-of-factly.

Sweeney seems to possess a winning combination of perspective – “this industry isn’t real life, it’s work,” she says – and focus. She grew up in a small town near Spokane, Washington, and persuaded her professional parents (who worked in law and medicine respectively) to let her audition for acting roles as a teenager by presenting them with a five-point business-plan.

Most stars like to present themselves as relatively unaffected by fame, but few are spotted at a Wetherspoons pub in the sleepy Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds, as Sweeney was last year. It turns out she was visiting her brother, a US Air Force officer stationed nearby. “He and a couple of friends from the base took me pub-crawling in their little town. It was fun,” she says.

Aside from the odd selfie request, could she fly under the radar? “I mean, in one [pub], there were only a couple of people,” she recalls, “but in another there was, like, a circle and everybody started dancing. It was just good energy, I loved it.”

“There’s not anything I can do [about online attention]”

Sweeney’s ability to see the bigger picture must have been helpful on several occasions in the last couple of years when American right-wing commentators have tried to use her to forward their agenda. When she hosted SNL this month wearing something less shapeless than a nun’s habit, conservative commentator Richard Hanania posted a clip of Sweeney with the sexist message: “Wokeness is dead.”

When we ask how she deals with this ludicrous strain of attention, she replies matter-of-factly: “There’s not anything I can do.” Does it make her want to stay off the internet? “Um, no, I think it’s important to be aware of everything and then use that information however I may well. But I’m just being me, that’s all.”

Creepy conservatives certainly won’t be tweeting about her love of Jane Fonda, one of Hollywood’s most stalwart liberal voices, whom Sweeney describes as “an incredible person and actor”. Sweeney is currently developing a remake of Barbarella, the cult 1968 sci-fi film starring Fonda that was adapted from a quirky French comic book.

Today, Sweeney says she can’t say much other than that the project is “moving along”, but adds: “I would love and be totally open to having Jane Fonda involved in whatever way she would like.” She says she took on the ambitious remake for multiple reasons. “It’s such a cool, campy, fun film and I love Jane Fonda,” she says. “And it’s fun to [take] a comic book and find more story within it and build a bigger world. I’m always trying to discover worlds I can build that are not even in the realm of reality.”

Going forward, Sweeney wants to continue being a hands-on producer, and keep making bold swings from glossy romcoms to the brutal horror of Immaculate. “I like to switch it up and kind of confuse people with what genre I’m doing,” she says with a laugh. “I kind of like that I’m throwing people off.

‘Immaculate’ is in cinemas from March 22

IMAGE CREDITS:
Featured and third:
Photographer: Elias Tahan
Styling: Molly Dickson
Hair: Bobby Eliot
Make-up: Melissa Hernandez
Nails: Zola Ganzorigt
Lighting assist: Gray Hamner

Second image:
Photographer: Elias Tahan
Styling: Jordan Shilee
Hair: Bobby Eliot
Make-up: Melissa Hernandez
Nails: Zola Ganzorigt
Lighting assist: Ryne Belanger

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