Everyone’s Wrong About Sydney Sweeney

At 27 years old, she’s the most prominent Zillennial on and off the screen, and her career defies neat categorization. In many ways, she’s an actress’s actress, carving out a respectable niche in indie and prestige film and television. But unconventionally, she’s also leaning into a different archetype. One that’s long been associated with ditziness, objectification, and loss of agency: the sex symbol posing in ads for products marketed to men, where the joke is often about her body.

However, Sweeney is more than just a revitalized piece of eye candy a la Megan Fox, Pam Anderson, or Carmen Electra. Her career can’t be chalked up to passive objectification nor empowerment feminism. She’s built a meta-aware brand that one cultural commentator characterized as “subversive vulnerability,” in which she “looks like the archetype but plays characters with instability and tension.” She gives you “emotional truth, not just polish.” Contrary to popular belief on right-wing male Twitter, she did not build her career on the back of being the hot, busty blonde. But let’s start from the beginning.

Sydney Sweeney’s Meteoric Rise

Sweeney got her start in the industry as a child actress, with acting credits dating back to 2009 (that would put her at just 12 years old). Women of the same age might recall her popping up in beloved series with guest spots in Heroes, Criminal Minds, 90210, Grey’s Anatomy, and Pretty Little Liars, often with humble credits like “Little Girl.” Within 15 years, she’d skyrocket to fame and have the entire world debating whether her jeans are fascist.

It was around 2018 that she started to transition to grittier, more demanding roles with notable screen time. I was first introduced to her as Alice in Sharp Objects, the troubled teenager Amy Adams befriends in the psych ward. It was a relatively small part in a mini-series. Just seven episodes. But they were incredibly impactful. I remember going through a hard time when I watched a pivotal episode wrapping up her arc, and I was just sitting there, sobbing. 

Her career can’t be chalked up to passive objectification nor empowerment feminism.

The same year, she landed a role as child bride Eden Spencer in The Handmaid’s Tale. Set up as the antagonist to June, she vied for the attention of her love interest, poised to be the most hated character. By the end of the season, I was yet again sobbing over another powerful, devastating, and impossibly sympathetic performance from Sweeney. These roles weren’t glamorous, attractive, or sexual. She looked ordinary; understated. 

Not only was she bare-faced, but the roles necessitated a chaste, sexless performance, whether as the religious zealot of a child bride in The Handmaid’s Tale—her now infamous body cloaked in modestly Amish or Islamic reminiscent garbs—or as the self-harming teenager in Sharp Objects. Characters who meet tragic ends experience real suffering, inner turmoil, and complex emotions. 

Her big break would come in 2019, when Quentin Tarantino plucked her from relative obscurity to play one of the Manson girls in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Though she played a small background part, she starred alongside Brad Pitt and Leo DiCaprio in what would become an Academy Award-winning film. That same year, she’d star in HBO’s Euphoria, the critically acclaimed drama about the messy lives of modern high schoolers in the age of social media as Cassie Howard.

Sweeney’s Filmography Reveals a Lot

Cassie Howard is a fascinating role to analyze because it not only catapulted Sydney Sweeney into stardom but also eerily parallels Sweeney’s public persona. She embodies a familiar trope: the damaged girl with daddy issues and intimacy wounds, abandoned by her father, both blessed and cursed with a well-endowed body that attracts relentless male sexual attention. However, Euphoria is intent on deconstructing Cassie’s sexualization. 

In season one, Cassie is passively objectified, groomed into hypersexuality by the world around her, but simultaneously punished for it. Catering to the “male gaze” fills the void in her self-esteem and longing for love. Ironically, her naivete and willingness to please the men in her life, born out of an almost childlike innocence, fuels a self-fulfilling cycle. They take advantage of her eager, male-centered malleability to push her to do things like have sex on camera, only to weaponize it against her and jeopardize what wholesome relationships she does have with men. Things unravel in a tragic arc that sees Cassie mainly being exploited and shamed by men, then discarded.

But in season two, Cassie transforms from a minor side character and passive victim of the gaze to its most zealous participant. Presented as a foil to Rue’s drug addiction, her drug of choice is just male validation. Season two is like one tedious unraveling of Cassie’s psyche, reputation, and dignity. She becomes shamelessly devoted to one thing: winning the love and attention of her best friend’s on-again-off-again lover, Nate Jacobs. In the process, we witness her devolve into something exceedingly grotesque: consumed by vanity, emotionally erratic, desperate, consumed by guilt. She’s constantly bawling her eyes out, screaming, having manic fits of rage and sadness, engaging in desperate stunts for attention that are unbearable to watch. 

Cassie becomes consumed by vanity, waking up three hours early to get ready for school, and finding cheap opportunities to display her assets, no matter how situationally inappropriate. At a house party, she becomes particularly desperate, randomly changing into a bikini and not so subtly slipping into the hot tub while she drowns her sorrows in booze. When they’re all in the hot tub, Cassie learns Nate has secretly been trying to get back with Maddy. She begins half-confessing and apologizing before projectile vomiting on herself and everyone else. The image is revolting: covered in vomit, red in the face, tears streaming as she pleads like a dog and simultaneously peers over to see if Nate is looking at her as she’s carried away. The scene is ludicrously funny and tragic at the same time. But you know what it isn’t? Sexy.

Sweeney’s acting choices reveal an intelligence and eagerness to provoke discomfort, to peel back the veneer of prettiness from the archetypes she’s cast in.

A lot happens in Season Two to document Cassie’s brutal unraveling, demonstrating how her complete loss of selfhood in pursuit of male validation is presented as a modern Ophelia. But this portrayal is deeply painful to watch. Cassie’s sexuality here isn’t glamorous or aspirational. It’s messy, pathetic, humiliating, profoundly sad, and at times, disgusting. It’s the polar opposite of the polished, male-gaze fantasy Sweeney is so often accused of embodying. That’s what makes the discourse around her so perplexing to me. I often wonder if we’re watching the same career unfurl. Because as much as Sweeney has embraced the ’90s bombshell persona to sell products, her place in the discourse often feels divorced from the context of her actual career.

Sweeney’s acting choices reveal an intelligence and eagerness to provoke discomfort, to peel back the veneer of prettiness from the archetypes she’s cast in. Sweeney’s other notable acting credits post-Euphoria stardom have included Reality, a former American intelligence specialist who leaks classified documents about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. She boasts a stripped-back, makeup-free appearance and dresses in bureaucracy-coded white button-downs. In 2021, she joined the ensemble cast in season one of The White Lotus to play Olivia Mossbacher, the caustic, hyper-educated teenager whose mother is the successful CFO of a major tech company. 

Again, this role is anti-bombshell. She plays a snarky, bare-faced teenager who lashes at all of her elder peers with wry savagery, channeling the affectless, monotone vocal fry of Red Scare’s Dasha Nekrasova and Anna Khachiyan. This is a key part of the puzzle. Sweeney admitted in an interview with The New York Times that show runner Mike White instructed her and her co-star to listen to the Red Scare podcast for inspiration. Sweeney told The New York Times, “I mainly listened to it for the frequency of the voices of these girls and the timing and the monotone. It was so dry and drawn out and slow. I would just emulate and copy that as much as I could and then bring it into the present day, Gen Z-esque-type woke Twitter girl.” 

Red Scare is an anti-woke cultural commentary and humor podcast that critiques neoliberalism and feminism, usually in a sardonic, detached, irony-poisoned manner. The podcast is emblematic of the vibes-based political landscape in our modern culture, where there’s a real Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump voter pipeline. It's associated with Dimes Square’s countercultural, artsy, indie scene that countersignals wokeness in a contrarian rather than partisan way.

Marketing, Producing, and Persona

In 2023, she starred alongside Glen Powell in the romantic comedy Anyone But You, a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Sweeney executive-produced the movie alongside her then-fiance Jonathan Davino through their production company, Fifty Fifty Films. Throughout the press tour, Sweeney and Powell amped up their chemistry to fuel rumors of an affair to help sell the movie, which made Powell’s real-life girlfriend so uncomfortable that they broke up. She had posted a series of Instagram stories expressing her feelings of disrespect.

The film revived many older 90s/early 2000s rom-com tropes, lending to Sweeney’s reputation as a star from a bygone era. 

Powell and Sweeney gave interviews about the film’s marketing, during which Sweeney revealed that she was intimately involved in the film’s marketing strategy. She told The New York Times, “I was on every call. I was in text group chats. I was probably keeping everybody over at Sony marketing and distribution awake at night because I couldn’t stop with ideas.” She continued, “I wanted to make sure that we were actively having a conversation with the audience as we were promoting this film, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who created the entire narrative.” Powell praised Sweeney’s marketing instincts, calling her “very smart,” and admitted to leaning into the chemistry rumors to sell the film. 

The sexual tension evoked Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith era, where on-screen chemistry blurred into tabloid speculation that famously ended Pitt’s marriage to Jennifer Aniston. For Sweeney, it fed into an “art imitates life” narrative: she played hypersexualized women consumed by male validation, like Cassie in Euphoria, and now the gossip cycle casts her as one. Her flirty rapport with Powell drew side eyes, affair rumors swirled for months, and Powell’s relationship publicly imploded, while Sweeney stayed engaged to her fiancé, giving interviews about wanting to be a “young mom” until their quiet split earlier this year.

Her next film, Immaculate, was a passion project that had been in the works for ten years. Sweeney originally auditioned to play Cecilia in the horror film when she was 16 years old, but the project never got out of development limbo. Feeling particularly drawn to the script, she kept checking back on it through her agents, but was told nothing ever came of it. Riding on the coattails of Euphoria's success, she started her own production company in 2020 and purchased the film rights from screenwriter Andrew Lobel, intent on making the film herself. She assembled the financing, hired frequent collaborator Michael Mohan to direct, and worked with Lobel to update the script to reflect her age as a then 25-year-old, which involved changing the location of the film from an Irish boarding school to an Italian monastery. 

The film yet again features Sweeney’s body obscured by a catholic nun’s habit; she is bare-faced and gives a powerhouse performance in the face of repression, exploitation, encroachments on bodily autonomy, and some serious trauma. The final three minutes of the film depict Sweeney (spoiler alert), covered in blood, giving birth to the anti-Christ she was forcibly impregnated with, whom she forces out of her body with feral screams and drool pooling out of her mouth in what feels like a scene that drags on forever. 

This was a creative decision Sweeney described as a cathartic expression of “feminine rage.” The ending is shocking and controversial, so I won’t spoil it here, but it’s certainly not catering to the pro-life crowd. The long take of her raw, guttural screams was shot on the very first take. Many would describe Immaculate as a pretty overtly feminist film, exploring themes like bodily autonomy, institutional control of women, and (a critique of) fetishization of female suffering. 

If you’ve noticed a theme here, it’s that Sweeney is very intentional about her roles, often choosing ones that have something provocative or sophisticated to say about the female experience. She’s been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and two Primetime Emmys. With six upcoming projects in the works, including a biopic about 90s female boxer Christy Martin, they’re sure to earn her more critical acclaim. Her physical transformation into a more androgynous, sexless icon will likely parallel Charlize Theron’s arc from “pretty face” to serious, Oscar-winning actress.

I seriously see this in the pipeline for her, but for whatever reason, it isn’t considered tenable to be beautiful, sensual, and talented. You have to partake in the uglification ritual. Only then can people see your acting prowess. This is particularly funny in Sweeney’s case, because the bulk of her filmography is the antithesis of sex appeal. She often looks homely and is completely covered up, while she evokes powerful feelings of dread, suffering, sadness, and rage. She can play it subtle like The White Lotus or go big, like in Immaculate.

And yet, most have become distracted by her public persona as a rebranded sex symbol: something that is incredibly apparent to me has not always been her life experience. She hardly exudes the sort of sex appeal that characterized Megan Fox’s filmography, and she also doesn’t accept the agency-less framing other Hollywood sex symbols have resorted to when their beauty and sensuality have played a significant role in shaping their appeal and popularity. 

Like some of these women who came before her, she’s embraced the commercialization of female sexuality to sell products, be it American Eagle jeans, HEYDude shoes, or Dr. Squatch men’s natural soap, to name a few. In 2021, around the time she was starring in The White Lotus (and before the premiere of Euphoria’s second season) she posted a video to Instagram of her crying after discovering she was trending on Twitter “for being ugly.” Through tears, she said, “I think it’s really important for people to see how words actually affect people.”

She’s spoken in interviews about how she takes brand deals “because she has to” and how growing up in a working-class family that experienced financial hardships like losing their home and life savings has made her hyper-aware of financial security. “If I wanted to take a six-month break, I don’t have income to cover that,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, explaining that the industry doesn’t pay actors like it used to. Overhead is expensive unless you’re already an established star, and the cost of living in Los Angeles is insane.

On a deeper (and sadder) level, she recalls auditioning through her teens, taking “really shitty projects” for little pay in the hopes it’d help her family keep the faith in her career and get her parents back together. She fantasized about making enough money to buy her parents’ house back and reunite them, but by 18, she had just $800 to her name, and her parents were still split up. Now that she’s achieved stardom and can afford to be more picky, she says most of her financial anxiety comes from the fear that if she doesn’t work, there’s no money or support for the kids she would have.

Can You Be an Agentic Sex Symbol?

Sweeney has led an interesting and, on the face of it, contradictory career. While commercially, she stars in ads that overtly play on her body, beauty, and sex appeal, her choice in roles has reflected a sensitivity to the implications of female objectification. And while you could argue that this is nothing but a ploy for money, a “do what you gotta do to get your bag, girl” strategy, she seems genuinely keen to take part in this sort of earnest appreciation for the female body. 

In 2023, she starred in The Rolling Stone’s music video for their new song, “Angry,” which featured Sweeney sprawled across a 1980s Mercedes-Benz 560 SL convertible. Sweeney sensually rolls around the back of the convertible as the video’s central eye candy. Backlash to the video from critics claimed Sweeney was being objectified, which she outright shut down in an interview with Glamour UK, instead opting for an agency-forward approach. She said, “One of the questions I get is, ‘Are you a feminist?’ I find empowerment through embracing the body that I have. That’s sexy and strong, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. I’m in a Rolling Stones video. How cool and iconic is that? I felt so good,” she said, adding that she “felt hot” and picked out her own outfit.

The interviewer offers thoughtful commentary that sheds light on Sweeney’s approach to discussing her body. Noting Sweeney’s blasé use of the word “tits” to refer to her breasts, the interviewer writes, “As someone that comes from a different generation, asking about ‘tits’ does not come naturally, but I’m impressed at the openness with which Sydney discusses her body. It feels like this is Sydney’s way of taking the power back.”

Asking Sweeney how it makes her feel for tabloids to run headlines referencing her “very busty display” she says that she’s noticed her body inspires commentary for wearing the same types of outfits that would be described as “sleek” and “so well-mannered” on smaller chests, “Just because I have boobs, it doesn’t change… I understand. I get it. It’s your headline. And those won’t change because then they won’t get the clicks.” But she seems to have made peace with the discourse around her body a long time ago. “Flaunt what you got. Own it. Love them,” she says, explaining that she didn’t always feel this way. 

In high school, she felt so uncomfortable about her larger chest that she vowed to get a breast reduction once she turned 18. It was her mom who convinced her not to, “and I’m so glad I didn’t,” she says. “I like them. They’re my best friends. Everybody’s body is beautiful. When you are confident and you’re happy within is when it really shows to other people.” However, for a long time, she had been in the habit of covering her body with oversized sweatshirts to hide her larger chest. “I went through that process of covering my body up at such a young age, but once I became more confident with myself, [it changed]. I want to show girls that it’s amazing and beautiful and empowering to have the bodies that we have.” 

Perhaps this casts her sexualized advertisements and Hooters SNL sketches in a different light—like she’s trying to get ahead of the sexualization she knows will take place anyway, but by being the driving force behind it, by laughing at herself, she maintains a vice grip on her agency. Sexualization isn’t something that just happens to her. The “male gaze” that feminists like to talk about is described as a voyeuristic indulgence in women’s bodies in a way that erases women’s humanity. It takes pleasure in gazing at women who aren’t gazing back, but Sweeney is gazing back, which makes her public displays of “look at me and ogle me” more tongue-in-cheek and camp than oblivious or exploitative.

Her brand isn’t explicitly liberal or conservative or really even vaguely political. In fact, one of the unique qualities that sets her apart from her contemporaries is how intentionally apolitical she is. She told Glamour UK that she keeps her social media focused on her work, with sprinkles of her personal life throughout, but that she “didn’t go to school to learn politics or social issues” and doesn’t think “speaking on things that [she’s] not fully educated on is the correct way to use [her] social media presence.”  

Her career is like this relentless exploration of what it means to be a woman in the modern world. It contains some elements of sex positive feminism, for sure, but she doesn’t proselytize about how she’s stunning and brave and owning the patriarchy for freeing the nipple, besides a few banal comments explaining why she doesn’t feel ashamed of going nude when she feels the artistic direction calls for it. Sweeney represents a modern girl with some very old-world sensibilities that lean conservative and country-coded, alongside an uninhibited view of sexuality, which she finds to be completely compatible with being a serious actress and a thoughtful person. 

This insistence with which she refuses to compromise on her sexuality or her femininity, knowing how it will be perceived or even held against her, to reduce her down to nothing but that, and to make the sorts of career choices and bone-chilling performances that she has is nothing short of trailblazing. It is a new kind of actress; a new type of celebrity that we haven’t seen before. We’ve only had actresses that were all one thing or the other, like a manifestation of the Madonna-Whore complex. 

You were either a Megan Fox or you were a Meryl Streep, but you certainly couldn’t be both. This wasn’t just a cultural understanding, but an internalized mindset. In order to work their way out of such a mold, they would have to retcon their sexuality, downplay their beauty, and do reddit-tier clap-backs calling out people for commenting on these things at all. They had to pay amends for their bombshell past in order to become a serious person. But Sweeney’s refusal to let it affect her choices or her own view of herself is how she maintains in control. She’s not following the Pam Anderson Baywatch era, followed by the now reformed, demure, makeup-less, asexual aesthetic pipeline; she’s asking why those two archetypes are mutually exclusive.

The Ideological Implications of Sydney Sweeney

She’s come to represent the post-woke girl next door because she’s leaned into her archetype as the cute, down-to-earth blonde who’s both feminine and sensual but can restore old cars, shoot guns, and do watersports. She can laugh at herself by playing into jokes about her larger breasts, but also venerates marriage and motherhood as deeply aspirational. She doesn’t bow to the woke mob when they attempt to cancel her (seemingly every five seconds) whether for attending a country-themed hoedown party for her mother where some guests reportedly donned Blue Lives Matter shirts and hats that played off of MAGA slogans, like “Make 60 Great Again,” or for catering to male audiences with tongue-in-cheek ads that claim to be selling her bathwater or for “nazi dog whistles” about her “great genes” or her outed alleged Republican voter registration.

Mind you, Sweeney was among the vocal advocates for Black Lives Matter back in 2020 and pays lip service to sex positive feminism pretty regularly. Each time the left loses its mind, she becomes further valorized as the new conservative “it girl.” Then, infighting among the right occurs, emphasizing that she’s not traditionally conservative if she bears it all on Euphoria (obviously). There is, however, an unfair caricature of Sweeney as this talentless sex symbol who gets paid to take her clothes off. To hold that opinion, though, you would have to be unfamiliar with Sweeney’s work. 

It’s true that Sweeney hasn’t shied away from nudity within the artistic vision of a series or a film, but she’s also pushed back against scenes she felt were gratuitous nudity that didn’t add anything to the story. She’s given interviews decrying the double standard in the industry, where men who do nude scenes are met with praise and awards but women face stigma. “I’m very proud of my work in Euphoria,” she told The Independent. “I thought it was a great performance. But no one talks about it because I got naked.”

She’s just a girl making sense of the world and living in accordance with her values in what seems, to her, to be pretty harmless. She’s talented, gorgeous, and appealing to men, but she chooses when to turn it off and on. She doesn’t find appealing to men inherently shameful as modern feminists want her to—where sex positive feminism is a thing reserved for ugly fat women owning the patriarchy by virtue of offending everyone’s eyes or something to renounce after you’ve made your bag, like Emily Ratajowski (but which seems to leave them off no happier and perhaps even more jaded.)

Sweeney doesn’t neatly fit into binary political dichotomies that have formed in recent years.

And she may not live up to the sexual morals of conservative trads, but the likening of her tongue-in-cheek bath ads, which are cartoonishly suggestive in a Looney Tunes sort of way, is hardly the sort of sexual depravity of actual pornographers or sex workers, as some have suggested. Things can not live up to your standards without making false equivalencies. A Renaissance painting of the female form is not porn. There are levels of vulgarity. 

If anything's evident to me, it’s that Sweeney doesn’t neatly fit into binary political dichotomies that have formed in recent years. She doesn’t fit the mainstream feminist nor traditional conservative molds. She’s made choices and statements that have, at times, been explicitly liberal or right-wing coded, but as Sweeney has previously stated, she didn’t set out to become some sort of political avatar. 

It’s just that her notoriety has come about in an interesting time, where right-leaning reverence for beauty and a reclamation of old school Americana as something aspirational rather than shameful has led conservatives to ask themselves, is sexualization of hot women good, actually? While I wouldn’t necessarily describe her seductive persona as an ultimate good that needs to be defended as something that upholds traditionally conservative values, Sweeney can’t betray a cause she never placed herself at the helm of. Much like the Dimes Square political scene or the Red Scare podcast, she occupies a post-political space that’s too ironic and countercultural for liberal orthodoxy but too transgressive and self-aware to be traditionally conservative. I’d describe her as a post-postfeminist bombshell.

Closing Thoughts

In an era where everything has to be politicized, every statement a bone to throw to your base, Sweeney takes us back to a simpler, nostalgic past, where women weren’t constantly criticized for liking and wanting to appeal to men. The social and political discourse she has inspired has largely been forced upon her, but her decisions have hardly been polemical. 

The way everything is so hyper-analyzed through a sociopolitical lens, the way everything is so on-the-nose, the fact that Sweeney’s inner world and true beliefs are largely a mystery rather than an advertisement, I think, is what makes her most compelling. Maybe she’ll come to regret the suggestive bathwater soap ads; maybe she won’t. But if there’s anything I appreciate Sweeney for, it’s her refusal to be chalked up to one thing, even if this mindset persists around her on both sides of the aisle.