Being a partial look at the career of Sydney Sweeney, an actress that people are extremely normal about…
The charm of surviving until middle age, and one that far too many people choose not to take advantage of, is the capacity to no longer be chained to contemporary popular culture; or, indeed, to even recognize it when it’s staring you in the face. There is, if you let there be, a joy in not knowing who or what the new big thing is. It is a blessing to be able to let go.
Anyway, I’m about to do the exact opposite of what I just said. And, as with all good journeys, it starts with Madame Web.
Madame Web
For better or worse, my specific brand of mental wiring meant it was inevitable that I would see a super hero movie starring Dakota Johnson regardless of the poisonous buzz. But it was the cast which gave me hope that the film might be, if not secretly good, then at least a fascinating exercise in brand mismanagement: Adam Scott! Emma Roberts! Mike Epps! Kerry Bishe! Zosia Mamet!
…And, of course, Sydney Sweeney.
Ultimately, the movie was far more the latter than the former, but much to my surprise the thing that jumped out at me the most was Sweeney’s performance as shy, bookish Julia Cornwall, destined to become Spider-Woman in some theoretical, more coherently plotted cut of the film.
It helps to understand that at this point I barely had an idea of who Sydney Sweeney was, or what her deal might be. ‘Hot and blonde and on some HBO shows that do not interest me’ was about the extent of my knowledge. But to the extent she had made any cultural impression in my mind, it was more or less wholly relegated to her being the proverbial, perhaps even bordering on prototypical, bombshell.
So I was taken aback when I saw her performance just how well she played a massive fucking nerd.
This, to me, was not the artifice of the hot girl who was ‘such a dork growing up’, where we just throw a pair of glasses on an unearthly hottie and call it a day. There was a genuine recessive quality that felt lived in… something that, whether accurate to her real upbringing or not, effectively approximated lived experience.
It was not a glamorous role, and certainly not the sort of showcase role you would take as an up-and-comer, and the fact that she not only took it, but made it work, fascinated me.
Not enough to follow up, mind you. But enough at least to take note.
But the actual impetus for this essay came this past summer, where Sweeney had a full four films come out, two of which were supporting roles in smaller films, giving performances in both that again belied the pop cultural image I had of her. With all that plus a farcical backlash that I will only begrudgingly address in passing, now seemed like as good an opportunity as any to actually find out for myself what the real Sydney Sweeney was about.
Clementine
The first stop on my journey was a small 2019 indie called Clementine, which proved… an inauspicious start. In it, Sweeney takes a backseat to Otmara Marrero’s Karen, an artist fresh off of being dumped by an older, more successful artist, billed only as D. (Sonya Walger). Reeling, Karen sneaks into D.’s lake house to… well, do some Sundance-style moping, mainly. In the process, she meets Sweeney as Lana, an aspiring actress of indeterminate age who exerts a pull on Karen that is so obviously ill-advised that the movie barely seems to know what to even do with it.
Watching this movie, which to be clear was not a particularly satisfying experience, still gave me a certain sense of nostalgia. When Cinapse first started, it felt like we mainly got screeners for films very much like this: small, low-key, noodly independent dramas about relationships. We were all new, and the experience felt novel and exciting. The movies, to my mind, never had much of an audience, but there was grace in the attempt.
A dozen years later, and these things don’t wear so well.
When you get right down to it, the film isn’t interesting or relatable. The “drama” at the heart of it is so aimless and abstracted that it’s hard to get a foothold in any kind of emotional resonance. It has the aura of a romantic drama but chooses to unfold itself, with its narrative withholdings and inexplicable character choices, with the tools of a psychological thriller. Which means priming the audience for a level of melodrama that writer-director Lara Gallagher has no intention of fulfilling. The tone is misjudged when its not being ponderous.
Plus, ultimately and perhaps inevitably, there’s an aspect of age that comes into it: our protagonist doing breaking and entering and squatting (and to the point, D.’s reaction when she finds out) is something that would barely pass the smell test if I were in my twenties and new to the world. But I’m closer to fifty than I am to forty and the main reaction I had to a lot of what unfolded here was ‘Ohhh, so you got dumped, did you? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Bella Hadid?’
An 80-minute exercise in everybody needs to grow the fuck up.
As for Sydney Sweeney… she’s okay, I guess. She’s supposed to be playing someone whose youth and obvious discontentment make her inscrutable to the more experienced and cynical Karen, and she does what’s asked of her. It’s a good performance, infused with an interestingly contradictory knowing naivete… but it’s not, in the writing or the performance, the sort of calling card performance one might hope for. It’s certainly not something that yells ‘a star is born’. The only thing that comes close to a particular moment to remember is when a hunky, leering landscaper (Will Brittain as Beau) tries to tell her she’s hot and she responds ‘People always think they’re the first to say that. But everyone always says that’. It’s a line that would be easy to oversell, especially as it implies character notes that the movie isn’t hugely interested in following up on. But there is an affectlessness to her delivery that, again, she makes feel lived in. For a moment, and it’s just a moment, the character and the movie actually feel like something almost real.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if Clementine was shot years before it’s 2019 release; certainly, Sweeney looks insanely young. But 2019 is also the year wherein both The White Lotus and Euphoria drop, which is to say that between Clementine and her next big film, she was propelled to a level of fame previously inaccessible.
Indeed this must be the point at which she became “hot”… in every sense of the word.
The Voyeurs
The Voyeurs, then, is writer-director Michael Mohan’s attempt to revive the erotic thriller, which was weirdly kind of a thing between 2021 and 2022. With the end of the Trump era, a tentative Hollywood asked the question ‘Are we ready as a society to get horny again?’ and the answer was a resounding ‘ew, gross, no’
Capitalism has turned us all into delicate little babies. Which is not ideal.
But I digress.
The film features Sweeney and Justice Smith as Pippa and Thomas, a weirdly well-to-do (optometrist and jingle writer, respectively) couple moving into to a fancy new apartment in Montreal. Their neighbors across the way are a frisky couple (Ben Hardy and Natasha Liu Bordizzo) with a penchant for open curtains and they can’t help but look. Obviously, it isn’t long before horny, harrowing hijinks ensue.
The first thought that came to mind while watching The Voyeurs was ‘Justice Smith is doing a voice, right? That’s not what he really sounds like’.
It is, frankly, hard to watch this after I Saw The TV Glow and not think of his performance, with the beard and the voice, as some kind of performative hetero masculinity.
It’s a bit off-putting… but you get used to it.
The film itself is actually quite good, both for what it is and what it’s trying to be. By my reckoning, the failed erotic thriller revival flamed out because most filmmakers were too busy handwringing over form to commit to the salaciousness. It’s not a genre you can redeem, or even ever truly subvert; if you can’t give yourself over the pleasures without guilt, you’re doomed to fail. And it’s to Mohan’s credit that he doesn’t blink in the face of that. More than any other, it feels like the blueprint to follow if we want to bring the erotic thriller back into the mainstream. Which, clearly we don’t. So never mind.
One of the absolute masterstrokes that Mohan brings to the table is in his casting of our leads: these are not your typical erotic thriller protagonists, and for the first half of the film, where such a distinction really matters, this pays great dividends.
Sweeney and Smith have a fun, playful chemistry as a couple; they really do read more as goofy friends than passionate lovers… which, of course, is absolutely part of the point. But as we’re soon to find out, both in the film and in her larger filmography, Sydney Sweeney is not entirely built for fun.
Indeed, what’s most interesting and surprising in the casting is just how much it runs counter to what you’d expect when you hear ‘Sydney Sweeney cast in erotic thriller’. If she was already too canny to allow herself to be cast in the femme fatale mold, one would not be at all surprised to find her portrayed as the innocent object of desire, and… well, not to give away the films’ ultimate game, but suffice it to say she is… not that. The moment that reveals “what we all came to see”, as it were, because of Mohan’s deftness both in scripting and in directorial style, achieves the sort of uneasy eroticism that this films predecessors aspired to but rarely achieved, skewing instead towards reptile brained titillation.
Not that I’m one to complain about that sort of thing, mind you. Just… making an observation here.
Look: The Voyeurs is, at heart, a ridiculous movie. The third act is profoundly unhinged, with each succeeding twist being just a little more over the top than the last until the top itself is just a distant memory, viewed from the deepest depths of outer space. But if you don’t think there’s intentionality behind all the absurdity, you’re only kidding yourself; the film takes its characters and its emotions about as seriously as it can given the circumstances, but at the end of the day knows what exactly kind of film it is. None of this is supposed to be taken seriously, and in the end this is what winds up making it sing.
For her part, Sweeney modulates her performance in interesting ways over the course of the film. The giddy thrill of youths first freedom, quietly tinged with the same sense of yearning and dissatisfaction she displayed as Lana in Clementine, slowly evolving into heedless busybody obsession, which immediately curdles into confused panic and ends in… well, that would be telling. Let’s not do that. Instead, let it suffice to say that for horny people with an almost superhuman disposition towards suspension of belief, The Voyeurs is a film well worth checking out.
Reality
Which brings us to Reality, perhaps better recognized as the point when Sweeney’s ambitions as a performer and the way she is viewed culturally permanently diverge.
For those unaware, Reality is an adaptation of the play Is This a Room, which in turn is based verbatim on the transcripts from the interrogation and arrest of whistleblower Reality Winner, who released classified information about attempts to sabotage the 2016 election. Both the play and the film were the work of Tina Satter, a playwright making her directorial debut. The film provides Sweeney with a unique and interesting challenge: playing a foregone conclusion while coloring within some very strict lines.
That is to say: we in the audience know how the story ends; the agents investigating her know how this story ends, and Reality herself knows what she did and almost certainly knows how this story ends. And so the entire film is essentially playing out a string by both the “characters” as well as the actors portraying them, who, by virtue of the very nature of the project, would seem to have extremely limited leeway in terms of interpretation of events.
It’s a tricky needle to thread, and that Sweeney meets it allows us to finally start getting into her particular set of skills and seeming interests as a performer.
The liking frame between all her characters is that every last one of them exists in a state that the Poet of Our Times Britney Spears pinned down as ‘Not a girl not yet a woman’; she is the only actress I can think of who traffics almost exclusively in utterly guileless characters whose unsure sense of self leads them to make catastrophic life choices or get manipulated by the people around her.
And part of that is merely a function of being, in fact, extremely fucking young. But as we see now, and as we will continue to see in future roles, the defining aspect of basically every character she plays is a certain lost-ness, an undefined amorphous yearning. And not even, necessarily for something specific. Just… something else.
Lana from Clementine is a bit too young to experience the full brunt of this, but the seeds are absolutely there. Indeed, that’s actually one of the big failings of the film itself. It’s clear that there’s meant to be a parallel between the dynamic between Karen and D. and the dynamic between Karen and Lana. But the film itself wants to revel in the ambiguity of whether or not Lana is someone who can be trusted. Which, even if it wasn’t executed in such a half-hearted manner, wouldn’t be playing to her strengths as a performer.
And an explicitly stated character trait of Pippa in The Voyeurs is her admission that she spent so much of her life in school (again, for optometry, this movie really is on one) that part of the joy of them being on their own is that she finally feels free to “make bad decisions”, and later expresses an ambivalence about the idea that her life might already be on rails. And that sense of dissatisfaction fuels many of the choices she makes in the film, most of which are, yes, quite poor. And she really does feel most in the pocket as a performer when those decisions blow up in her face and she’s forced to process the fallout.
The thing that I’m realizing as I watch these is that there are many reasons Sweeney makes a poor fit as a sex symbol, not the least of which is the fact it’s clearly not a status she’s actively pursuing. But more than that, there’s just a vulnerability to her that is, in a certain way, the exact opposite of sexy.
It’s not the only complicating element, as we’ll soon find out. But it’s a pretty meaningful one.
So then, when we return to Reality, we find Sweeney taking on the task of giving what needs to be, by definition, a profoundly internal performance. The constraints of the structure and the general casualness of most of the dialogue (which for a not insignificant portion of the film revolves around mundanities such as pet care and workouts) make it difficult to build out character in the way a more conventional approach would.
This isn’t a docudrama where you can just add scenes for context and backstory and emotional heft; everyone involved is limited to the words in the original transcript. And until the agents close in for the proverbial kill, very little of it gives you much explicit insight into who Reality is and what makes her tick.
What we’re watching, essentially, is the end of a Columbo episode, stretched out for about an hour, and decidedly devoid of salacious details . We are granted a bit of insight into the information that was leaked via insert, but as the dialogue all takes place between people who already know what these things mean, there’s an extent to which we as the audience just need to smile and nod at the finer details.
And once again, what Sweeney does within those restraints is fascinating. She opts to play the scenes of dialogue at face value, all polite accommodations and submission, as if not inconveniencing the people who are after her might make her less guilty than she is. Instead, she invests all the tension into her silences, wherein she observes while trying almost desperately to not look like she’s observing. And, because the real Reality didn’t have a full breakdown, so too is Sweeney denied one. The physical and emotional collapse that will prove to be something of a calling card isn’t on the table, so again she turns inward, the final admission of defeat and realization of what it means for her almost feeling like a dissociative episode. It’s an impressive act of needle threading that puts the lie to those who claim she can’t actually act.
(I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout-out to Josh Hamilton and Marchant Davis as the interrogating agents, who play off of Sweeney very well, and infuse their functionary roles with a sort of lived in mix of authority and clock punching matter-of-factness).
Though in the broadest possible terms Reality could be considered a sort of real life thriller, the movie is obviously more interesting for the idiosyncratic execution. But just as obviously it’s also not the stuff of mainstream success, the holy grail. And sooner or later, a person with the ambition of a Sydney Sweeney has to take her swing. The success of Euphoria had put eyes on her and given her a certain demographic cache… which it was now time to start cashing in.
Anyone But You
Of all the films I decided to watch for this project, the one I was dreading the most was Anyone But You. It would be inaccurate to say I don’t like romantic comedies– I’ve seen far too many of them to get away with that stance– but the bar for entry is way, way, wayyyyy higher than for any other genre. No genre of films rests more on the charm of the actors who populate it, and no genre can be harder to tolerate when those elements wind up out of whack.
Regardless, this was a necessary viewing, as it is by a wide margin her biggest box office hit as a (co-) lead and indeed, her first real attempt at a star vehicle.
So how is it…?
Look: we’re like 3000 words into this thing now, the time has well and truly passed for mincing words: this movie is terrible.
Like, shockingly bad.
Romantic comedy is, by its very nature, a delicate genre. Unlike action movies or horror movies, we all have some level of experience with love and romance. So more than any other, we as an audience are aware of the tropes and the cliches inherent to it. Which, to be clear, isn’t necessarily a condemnation; it’s a popular genre because those tropes and those cliches are a comfort; the right casting with the right chemistry and nobody is walking out thinking ‘that was bullshit’, they’re thinking ‘Man, if only it could really be like that’.
The fantasy is the juice.
Anyone But You breaks the sacred contract between dreamers and cinema by being so detached from actual human behavior that it feels like an alien transmission. I simply do not understand how you get here and think this works, it’s genuinely baffling.
We cutely meet our protagonists, law school dropout Bea (Sweeney) and Glen Powell’s Ben (whose job is crunches I think) at a coffee shop, where Bea is trying to use the bathroom without purchase. Ben swoops in to save the day, posing as her husband so she can avoid the long line and a match is made.
Works well enough on paper, perhaps. Significantly less so in execution.
Because what starts out as a blandly functional intro to our characters takes a turn as we enter the bathroom with Bea, who sprays water on herself to make it look like she’s peed her pants, and the whole thing devolves into a slapstick set piece where she’s nervously ladling out exposition about herself while awkwardly trying to angle her crotch to the auto dryer on the wall.
And it does not land. At all.
Look, we don’t have time to go scene for scene on just what makes this movie so lousy, even though there’s a sense in which that’s all I want to do. But I’m not here for that; I’m here for Sweeney, making her bid for the big leagues, taking her shot at straight down the middle, mainstream Hollywood success.
And, in the process, provides some fairly damning evidence that this is not her lane.
Part of the job when it comes to being a star in the classical sense, is having a very specific kind of charisma, one that can paper over the flaws in a script or a predictable beat. It’s just as much about salesmanship as it is performance.
And it only takes going back to the opening scene to map out why it’s a game Sydney Sweeney simply does not seem cut out for.
Because the thing is, Sweeney commits to the bit. In this, and another slapstick scene on a plane before the film totally forgets that she’s supposed to be a klutz, she goes all in. You can almost see her make the calculations in her head regarding the best angle and the correct timing.
Which, of course, is exactly the problem.
Because what we are learning as her style evolves is that she loves to put in The Work.
But she also likes to Show Her Work, and that is quite simply something you cannot do if you’re going to be an Actual Star.
The audience absolutely can not see you trying.
And the half-assed script and lackadaisical direction leaves her no choice but to try. And try very, very hard. Which makes it interesting to compare with Glen Powell’s efforts to salvage this thing. They’d both been in the game for a hot minute by the time this project rolled around, and Powell in particular has been attempting to game out the sort of old school box office star career that doesn’t really exist anymore. And to his credit, he really does have the charisma to pull it off; in a healthier system, he would indeed be a star. And while no one in this film covers themselves in glory (the material itself pretty much rules that out as even a possibility), he at least knows to toss off the assorted bits and gags in a way that Sweeney seems predisposed not to. There’s a certain ease required to sell these things, which is a hell of an ask for someone whose whole stock in trade thus far has been characters who are corrosively ill at ease.
Interestingly, her Bea continues the thread of characters who are defined by their uneasy, work in progress status. Her basic arc over the course of the film is to develop the courage to tell her parents she’s not actually sure what she wants to do with her life. Which, credit where credit is due, is a somewhat unique terminus point for a character, and one that certainly plays to Sweeney’s strengths as they currently stand. And there’s merit in her finding a more lighthearted variation on her typical M.O. But this also kind of feels like as far as she can possibly go in that mold. One is almost inclined to respect the ambition and lament the execution, and chalk it up to picking the wrong project.
Except… turns out that Sweeney had more sway behind the scenes than one might expect for a first outing. As an executive producer, apparently she was the one to cast Powell (wise choice!), recruited Will Gluck to direct (hey, Easy A was fun, can’t argue the logic!) and… contributed to the script (genuinely disappointing to find out).
But in a twist that I can only make sense of by invoking some kind of oasis-desert metaphor, the film was a decent sized hit; regardless of the fact that it was a trash fire in search of a welcoming dumpster, people seemed to like the movie. And with that, Sweeney was elevated to another level.
But by the time all that had even happened, Sweeney had already gamed out her next move.
As it happens, Sweeney wasn’t content to attack stardom from just the one angle; even while setting up Anyone But You, she had already used her burgeoning clout to develop her own vehicle as a full producer by resurrecting a film she auditioned for back in 2014 that wound up in development hell, and personally bringing in none other than The Voyeurs director Michael Mohan to direct.
And thus was Immaculate reborn.
Immaculate
Here Sweeney plays Sister Cecilia, a novice who travels to a convent in Italy by special invitation and, inevitably, winds up in a family way. But as the title indicates, you can tell something sinister is afoot, on account of it not even being remotely maculate.
Aside from the patron saint of the adrift, one really is led to wonder just what it is that defines a Sydney Sweeney performance.
Meanwhile, the thing I keep fixating on is that she was about 16 or 17 when she auditioned for this movie.
If it was for the lead role…I am not even remotely surprised that version of the film did not get made. And to consider the possibility that at the age of 26, she was roughly ten years too old for the part.
You can kind of see the shape of that version of the film, but it has to be said its hard to imagine the original version being as enjoyable an experience as the version that actually got made. From his two credits, Mohan has proved himself a deft hand at genre pieces, and Immaculate unfolds its assorted shocks and grotesqueries at a steady, agreeable clip. The film is a little under 90 minutes, and feels cut to the bone; one gets the sense that there were twenty or so minutes in the second act that made the film hold together just a little bit stronger and it got cut because they realized they could just about get away with not having it. And frankly, it was the right choice.
As for Sweeney… well, it’s honestly a bit of a tricky read why this was the story she felt driven to cash her chips on. As loath as we are as a society to attribute agency to a gorgeous celebrity, Sweeney has, in interviews, assayed a certain strategic acumen in terms of her career. She has been very transparent that her signing on to Madame Web had little to do with her fandom of a fairly obscure Spider-Man character and everything to do with getting in good with Sony Pictures, and equally transparent about her and Glen Powell conspiring to fake irl romantic tension during their promotional campaign for Anyone But You. It is not, on the face of it, a massive leap to think that Sweeney saw a horror flick as a good opportunity to bank more audience cred. Horror is cheap, budget wise, and a famously female friendly genre. In a sense, it’s kind of a no-brainer to go there.
But even with that, the question still remains: why this movie? What is it that stuck with her to the point that, after a full decade, she was so determined to circle back?
Well, there’s of course the aspect of the character that ties it in with many of her previous roles: we learn that Sister Cecila dedicated her life to the Church after a near-death experience as a child. She feels that God must have saved her for a reason, but in the tradition of all Sydney Sweeney characters to this point, she remains unsure of what that reason might actually be and places herself at the mercy of whoever might steer her towards some kind of path… with predictably gruesome results.
There’s also the challenge of being a stranger in a strange land; the film takes place in Italy, and a point is made of how much difficulty Sister Cecilia is having learning Italian; the ongoing communication gap, and the sense of alienation it engenders, remains an undercurrent of everything that happens, further highlighting the sense of alienation and helplessness. It’s not hard to see how playing that out might appeal to her performance sensibilities.
But, come on, who are we kidding?
It’s the childbirth.
It’s gotta be the childbirth.
Spoilers, I suppose, but the final twenty or so minutes of the film revolve around Sister Ceclia having to extricate herself from the horrific situation she’s found herself in, all while in extremely painful labor. As the supremely physical actress she is, it wouldn’t be even a little surprising if the thought of playing all that out stuck in her mind… to say nothing of the cackle inducingly sicko final shot of the film.
So that most likely explains the ‘why’ of it all. Which leaves only one last question to answer: so how is she in the part?
…ehh, okay I guess.
She’s a pro at being victimized and ill at ease, so being the lead in a horror movie is a bit of a layup, at least in the abstract. But the thing that the inexplicably successful debacle that was Anyone But You proved is that while she’s always game and always commits, she hasn’t yet developed the ability to elevate the material. Sweeney is perfectly fine here, but other than the way she fully gives herself over to the tortured physicality of the final act, she doesn’t really bring anything to the material that makes it feel like she was the only possible choice for the film; it’s hard to escape the feeling that a lot of other actresses in her age range also could have done this.
But let’s not kid ourselves, that’s really only an issue for people who are doing an insane, fairly comprehensive look at her overall career arc. For the average Joe or Jane just looking for a good and gruesome time, both Sweeney, and the film as a whole, will more than get the job done.
Americana
And now, a bit of a peek behind the curtain: while I am cataloging these films in chronological order, that is neither the order in which I watched them, nor the order of release. Just as Immaculate was already finished before Anyone But You had started filming but wound up released after, the bumper crop year that was 2025 consisted of one movie that had been shot in 2022, one that had been shot after Immaculate but before Madame Web but wound up getting released a full year after; a Netflix film that we won’t be going into because Netflix movies don’t actually count; and a biopic about which we’ll be getting into soon enough.
All of this to say the vagaries of wide release adds a certain complexity to the goal of tracking a career evolution.
Because for all that my February 2024 viewing of Madame Web began my curiosity with regards to Sydney Sweeney, in full disclosure it was the thought that occurred to me during my viewing of Americana in August of 2025 that set off the chain of dominoes leading to the article you’re presumably still reading right now:
“Are we sure that Sydney Sweeney is the sexiest woman alive? Are we sure that it’s not just that the culture wars have cooked our brains so badly that we no longer know how to process the existence of big boobs as a society…?”
Because this role as written absolutely would not work if she was what people say she is; there’s a certain point where the disconnect between who she is as an actress, how she’s portrayed as a celebrity, and what she gravitates to as a performer (and, even more to the point, how she’s gone about using the power she’s accrued) becomes an albatross, a burden to be overcome rather than negotiated with. And, perhaps predictably, at this point, she decides that the only way out is through. And with that choice, that inwardness, that sense of insularity, goes from a defense mechanism to an act of defiance. In this potentially cheesy role in this small, kind of goofy movie, we, in the most paradoxically perverse manner possible, find Sydney Sweeney finally expressing the power she wields offscreen onscreen, all by going small.
This, by the way, is as good a defense of the stutter as you’re going to get. So you damn well better appreciate the effort.
Sweeney plays Penny Jo (yeesh), a mousy waitress with country singer dreams, hampered both by her inherent meekness and a prominent stutter. A stray napkin at work clues her to a potential big payday and she winds up joining forces with literally brain damaged veteran Lefty (Paul Walter Hauser) to try and make a run at that proverbial big score.
Though she does receive top billing, Sweeney is really part of an ensemble; if the corny names, the quirky character traits and the stray napkin didn’t make it obvious, Americana is a multi-character comedic thriller where a bunch of idiots and psychos kill each other over a relatively small amount of cash.
It is, to put it mildly, rather late in the day to still be trafficking in post-Tarantino crime comedies, but considering how terrible this sort of thing can be, this somewhat country fried take isn’t nearly as obnoxious as it could have been. They are certainly far more amused by the idea white kid culturally appropriating Native American to a megalomaniacal degree (Zahn McClarnon as Ghost Eye, dutifully giving a one joke premise all he’s got) than I am, or ever possibly could be. But their heart seems at least slightly more in the right place than I’ve come to expect from this sort of thing. Call it the benefit of low expectations.
Co-star Halsey’s bit gets the “Empowerment” end of the arc, while it falls to Sweeney and Hauser to provide the “Heart”. And here’s the thing: they actually make quite the couple.
Now let me be clear here: if you’re expecting me to marvel, mouth agape, at the idea that All-American Smokeshow Sydney Sweeney actually sells something like a romance with Modern Troll Paul Walter Hauser, I need you to kindly rethink your entire life. The man may be typecast in various goon, goober or creep roles, but it only takes two minutes of real world interview (or simply seeing his small, scene stealing role in Fantastic Four: First Steps) to recognize that the man has charm and humor to spare. But more than that, he’s got a certain unmistakable earnestness, which in this case humanizes a character that one gets the impression was not quite as achingly human on the page.
And Sweeney meets him where he is on that score, which is all the more impressive given the very big, very glaring handicap the movie saddles her with; there is no way we should be able to buy into the character given that silly-ass stutter. And that her performance works in spite of it is improbable, yet somehow true. And the even more fascinating aspect of it all is simply that, through a quirk of release dates, it also offers an evolution of the Sydney Sweeney archetype that we’ve been following so far: while still inherently recessive, Penny Jo is not aimless, and has actual goals and makes actual moves towards achieving those goals. Her characters are beginning to act, instead of simply being acted upon.
Eden
With that in mind, it is… tricky to determine whether her small role in Ron Howard’s Eden could be considered a step backward or a holding pattern.
I mean, honestly what comes to mind first and foremost is If I had a nickel for every time a Sydney Sweeney character undergoes an extremely painful childbirth while fighting off an extremely hostile and dangerous outside threat… well, you know the rest of the meme.
Brought in last minute to replace Daisy Edgar-Jones due to Writer’s Strike related scheduling issues, Sweeney kills a bit of time here playing Margret, the wife of Daniel Bruhl’s idealistic doctor who, inspired by a philosophical tract by writer/would-be philosopher Fredrich Ritter, moves her and their young son to a wildly inhospitable island in order to start a new life.
(Ritter is played by Jude Law, so… you kind of get it)
In one sense it’s an evolution: the first time Sweeney is playing a wife, as well as a mother. But of the entire cast, she’s given the absolute least to do. If this is what was on the page, one imagines Edgar-Jones wasn’t too miffed about having to bow out on this one. Switch hitter Sweeney barely even makes an impression until the aforementioned childbirth scene, where her water breaks while her husband and son are away, going into labor right as a pack of wolves stumbles upon their homestead. It’s a tense, harrowing scene… and one I’m glad I saw before Immaculate, because I think it might have suffered in the comparison. So it goes.
But that aside, she’s really just kind of… there. The real show is Ana De Armas, who absolutely blows the doors off the place as Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wernhorn, absolutely having a ball as a delusional, manipulative self-proclaimed Baroness who plans to build a decadent hotel on the island but proves to be woefully ill-equipped for literally every aspect of island life. Truly glorious villain of the year stuff in her performance; everyone else kind of just has to take a back seat when she’s on screen. If the movie is worth seeing (mileage may vary), she’s kind of the best reason why.
Because it sure as shit isn’t worth it for a Sweeney fix.
Christy
Which, at long last, brings us to the final film in our journey, Christy.
And, sadly, the point at which the real world must intrude.
All throughout this essay, I’ve done my best to focus primarily in on the movies, because that was the thing that interested me, the disparity between the image of Sydney Sweeney in my mind and the roles I had actually seen her in. And the image I had in my head was largely the result of the various real world controversies she has found herself involved in. Namely, attempts by the right wing to claim her as one of their own.
It started when she hosted SNL in February of 2024, and multiple articles came out (oddly enough, mostly written by women) about how her prominent cleavage in many of the sketches was somehow a repudiation of wokeness; that the very existence of boob jokes on a late night comedy show means that we can all finally stop pretending that there isn’t such a thing as empirical beauty standards.
I feel dumber for having typed it, and I’m sorry if you feel dumber for having read it.
This, in turn, led to a right wing backlash when Sweeney put on 30 pounds of muscle to portray real life champion boxer Christy Martin. And, after she slimmed down to her regular buxom size, was reclaimed by the right in the wake of a jeans commercial controversy which I personally found so embarrassing that I can’t even bring myself to get into it. But suffice to say, her attempt to ignore this particular controversy backfired in a big way.
The thing is, in any other time or circumstance, she arguably would have been playing this just right; any actor as career minded and savvy as Sweeney has been knows better than to alienate large swaths of their audience, and so often the best thing to do is to say nothing.
But because our gender dynamics are just kind of generally fucked on a societal level, nobody on the left came to her defense when the right was explicitly co-opting and objectifying her; and a certain segment of the population is so brain fried from all this stuff that they immediately granted the worst faith reading of what was in actuality just a dumb bit of wordplay and assumed the worst and dismissed her, and her body of work out of hand.
So, if that’s the sort of nonsense that you’ve got floating around in your head, mostly unprompted… and then you go see Madame Web, I really don’t know how you can have any other reaction besides ‘All that… for her?’
The cultural conversation would lead you to think she’s just this sexpot, playing nonstop sexy roles, but that’s absolutely not the case. And then, culturally disconnected as I am, I think: maybe it’s her promotional routine that gave people that impression. So I did a scan of her Instagram and all I saw were red carpet gowns and like, ski trips with the girls and shit. No Maxim-style centerfold spreads. Not even a single handbra! Shocking!
The general consensus about Sydney Sweeney seems to be a projection of what we expect of an actress when she’s shaped like that, the irony being that if you actually watch her movies, there’s a pretty good chance you won’t even realize she’s shaped liked that.
People want her to be the 21st century Pamela Anderson, but this whole time she’s been gunning for Julianne Moore.
And with all that in mind, it would be great to be able to say that Christy winds up being her ultimate triumph. It would certainly make a better ending for this article. But unfortunately, it’s a partial victory at best. On the one hand, her performance is really good; having a fuller idea of her performance history gave me a ton of insight into what she’s learned about her strong points as an actor, and how well she’s learned to utilize herself that gives me confidence in her what she might be able to do in her career going forward.
So that was nice.
But the film itself is a dour fucking slog that made about thirty cents at the box office, and while I violently disagree with the rhetoric around that failure, I can’t say I blame people for not showing up.
Christy Martin, who I was not aware of before the film, absolutely has an interesting life story worth telling: brought onto the big stage by none other than Don King himself, the first female boxer to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated, closeted lesbian, domestic abuse survivor… a lot to work with, there. And in its finest moments, the film captures the perverse endorphin rush of applied violence as a form of self-affirmation.
Unfortunately, the film styles itself as more of a biographical drama that takes place in the world of sports than an actual sports picture. And while you can absolutely see why that take might have appealed to Sweeney and the filmmakers, their approach deprives the audience of any real sense of triumph.
It truly feels like there is no scene of Martin experiencing success or victory that isn’t almost immediately followed by some fresh hell for her to endure. And while, yeah, that’s kind of how drama works, we never spend enough time lingering in the joyful moments to feel the sting when they get ripped away. The overall effect becomes deadening.
And none of this is helped by the omnipresence of Ben Foster as her husband/trainer/abuser James Martin. It is, technically, a good performance as a pathetic, insecure parasite of a man who lashes out at the tiniest blow to his preposterously fragile ego. He’s simply an unpleasant character to be around, and it quickly grows oppressive and tiresome; doubly so if you’ve seen more than two Ben Foster performances already and are familiar with his twitchy bag of tricks.
As for the other performers, they’re all generally pretty good, if not exactly deep characterizations. On the one hand, one wants to say that the generally wonderful Merritt Wever goes too broad as Christy’s homophobic, conservative Christian mother Joyce… but I suspect it’s not quite the caricature we’d like it to be. It’s a deeply despicable character in exactly the ways you would expect that sort of character to be despicable, and it is another failing of the film that the scene where Christy finally stands up to her feels so underbaked and un-cathartic. You keep waiting for a fist pumping moment of empowerment that never really comes.
Ethan Embry as Christy’s father is less prominent and has less to do, but speaks volumes in his pained silences and exhausted, defeated attempts to try and mitigate Joyce’s poisonous approach to motherhood.
Jess Gabor has a small but interesting role as the high school girlfriend who pops in and out of her life over the decades. The evolving dynamic between Gabor and Sweeney is a fascinating aspect of the story that you almost want to see more of, even though it wouldn’t make narrative sense. And Katy O’Brien, in what amounts to little more than a glorified cameo, kind of sparkles as Lisa Holewyne, Christy’s biggest rival who isn’t nearly the enemy Christy thinks she is.
The thing I have to wonder, though: is it a problem when your star vehicle gets stolen right out from under you by a character who is probably on screen for less than ten minutes of your nearly two and a half hour film? Because Chad L. Coleman’s interpretation of Don King is the best thing in the entire movie, and it’s not even particularly close.
Which leaves us to turn our attention, one last time, to Sydney Sweeney.
What I can say for sure is this: that the film doesn’t work has nothing to do with its lead performance. In Christy Martin, Sweeney has found a real life character upon which to lay on all the traits which have defined her characters up until now: the vulnerability, the rootlessness, the repression, the sense of self-abegnation spiked with an absolute terror of introspection.
But then she adds some top notch punching skills on top of that. Which I think we can all appreciate.
Sweeney really does a good job with the physical aspects of the role; she absolutely nails the choreography of the in-ring sequences, and the fights are among the most exciting and entertaining portions of the film. But since director David Michod isn’t really going for that angle, it’s not the part that gets the focus. The larger thrust of the movie is that Christy Martin finds a sense of purpose and validation that comes at the cost of her sense of self, with the question being whether or not she’ll be able to free herself of the false binary that makes her think she has to choose. But she adds a rougher edge to the dilemma in a way that almost circles all the way to her performance as Lana in Clementine, blithely trying on identities not out of a sense of manipulation or malice, but curiosity and a need for escape. One imagines she didn’t want to be an actress to be loved and adored, but so someone would just tell her who to be.
And so it’s hard not to imagine that Christy is how Lana would have ended up if she had been into sports instead of acting. After all, it’s all performance anyway, isn’t it? But there was, on occasion, a spikiness to Lana that never really showed up in her later roles, and it really lends itself to the character she’s embodying here. Because make no mistake: Christy Morgan is a straight up asshole for much of the picture. Her persona as a fighter, shaped as it is by her sexist, “old fashioned” husband, mixes the arrogance of an elite athlete with the Pick Me rhetoric of your average tradwife. Slinging homophobic slurs at her opponents isn’t just good promo, it’s her way of deflecting the secret truth she thinks will cost her everything she’s built.
And it is the very fact that she gets to play some less savory notes and winds up doing pretty well for herself that reassured me in terms of her future prospects. As good as I think she’s been in the stuff I’ve watched, the increasing feeling I had as I ventured further and further in was that this was an unsustainable approach to character, at least if the goal is being a mainstream star.
As good as she’s been at finding variations on ‘Little Girl Lost’, it’s not the sort of thing one can carry into their 30s and 40s. And for all her talents and shrewdness behind the scenes, so far she’s still only as good as the script allows her to be; her capacity for the internal slow boil and her skill at portraying emotional and physical collapse are great for drama and horror but don’t translate quite as well to lighter fare. She tries hard in Anyone But You (which, as previously stated, is part of the problem), but being endearing in the way a headliner has to be isn’t really in her wheelhouse. There’s a certain level of winking in the pact between a star and their loving audience, and for better or for worse, there’s not a lot of irony with Sydney Sweeney. To say nothing of the fact that when you get right down to it, audiences are not wired in a way where they can easily accept someone who looks like that and plays things genuinely awkward and hapless.
The contradictions are part of what makes her more than the generic sexpot she’s taken to be, and even though it doesn’t fully succeed as a movie, it manages to integrate those contradictions into the text in rewarding ways pushes her in newer, spikier directions that indicate a greater range than previously imagined. In that sense (if only in that sense), the movie did its job.
Mind you, most people are still unaware of the potentiality, because no one fucking saw the movie. But that’s showbiz for ya. The good news is that she’s still got one more ace up her sleeve: even as this article is being published, Sweeney will be returning to the big screen in The Housemaid, directed by Paul Feig and co-starring none other than Amanda Seyfried. Feig’s A Simple Favor had no business being as fun and entertaining as it wound up being; hell, it even (briefly) tricked me into thinking I might actually be a Blake Lively fan when no, it turns out it was mainly this, one Saturday Night Live sketch and finding The Rhythm Section mildly enjoyable. But I digress.
Point being, Paul Feig is a talented guy with good crowd pleasing instincts, give or take a reboot, and it’s exciting to see what he does with the surprisingly idiosyncratic talents of Sydney Sweeney, who I hope I’ve established, lo these many paragraphs is an interesting actor who deserves a closer look.
But not that way, you friggin’ pervert. I swear, why do I even bother…?
