When Sydney Sweeney puts her mind to something, you better believe she’s going to do it. So, when she woke up one morning this year and made a pledge to herself to be more present, that’s what she damn well did. ‘I decided I was just gonna soak up every single moment and be so thankful. And I’ve been doing that,’ she tells me on a Monday morning in New York.
Specifically it’s the first Monday in May, which means ‘today I’m allowing myself to be, like, “Oh my God, I’m going to the Met [Gala]!”’ We are sitting on a sofa in Sweeney’s suite at The Carlyle, which on Met day, like its Upper East Side neighbour The Mark, is the unofficial pre-game HQ. Inside, the lobby and corridors are a hive of industrious assistants; outside, throngs of photographers and fans already crowd the streets waiting for a glimpse of their favourite A-listers — including a better-late-than-never Rihanna and A$AP Rocky — on their way to the ball. Right now, bar a knock from her stylist’s assistant and a call from reception (‘Someone wants to drop off a champagne, I don’t know!’ she says with a lol-this-is-all-so-weird look), it’s just me, Sweeney and Tank, her beloved dog that she rescued eight years ago.
The new in-the-moment mindset was encouraged by one of her friends after the 2022 Emmys where Sweeney was a double nominee (for The White Lotus and Euphoria, roles that proved in different ways that there is absolutely nothing as terrifying as a teenage girl) who observed that she didn’t think her pal had let that sink in. Success, she was cottoning on, can be subjective. ‘I am fearful — because I’m always wanting to push myself to do more and more — that I will never actually feel that I’ve accomplished what I’ve set out to do,’ she says. ‘I think last year I didn’t realise the moments in my life were happening to me’.
If recent history has felt a little surreal, that’s understandable. The quintessential overnight sensation who was years in the making, she seemed to catapult into the zeitgeist out of nowhere. What was the role that changed everything? ‘I think I had a mini turning point with Sharp Objects and Everything Sucks! where I finally had something on my resumeÌ that people could watch and let me in the room to audition. Then I had a quarter turning point with The Handmaid’s Tale, and then I had a full turning point with Euphoria. All of that happened in a year so it was like, woooo, real fast.’
Sweeney is 25 but seems both younger and older than that. She possesses the wide-eyed sincerity of a small-town teenager (on what gets her excited: ‘A really good scoop of Rainbow Sherbet ice-cream’ — Baskin Robbins, in a waffle cone dipped in chocolate with sprinkles and Gummi Bears on top, FYI — ‘that gets me riled up!’). And she also possesses the insight of a woman of the world (on what scares her: ‘I think this is a universal one, but I’m scared of being alone. You’re constantly surrounded by so many people, but at the same time you’re always alone’). Physically she has an amorphous quality, too. When she’s in glam, Sweeney looks almost like an AI-generated bombshell, but today she appears sweet and unassuming in her pyjamas (a gift from Prada, admittedly: ‘I’m usually in sweats! This feels real fancy’). In both guises, she has hard-to-define, impossible-to-miss charisma. She has it.
If there is a through-line in the characters Sweeney plays, it is that they, too, defy easy categorisation. Take Euphoria’s Cassie, a show-stealing performance in which she teased out the vulnerability of a girl sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend. That character’s ensuing hysteria, including the much-memed, ‘I have never, ever been happier’, was uncomfortably identifiable for anyone who’s ever looked for validation in all the wrong places. Show me a person who could not see themselves in Cassie and I’ll show you a liar. ‘Because she’s the inner girl in everybody. She just lets it out, where a lot of people suppress that Cassie,’ Sweeney says, mischievously.
Those mixed messages are what gets Sweeney going. ‘I think the world has become less forgiving, [but] we can never become better people if we don’t learn how to forgive and have empathy and allow people to grow and make mistakes.’ She continues: ‘Women are such complex and layered individuals. On page you could have read Cassie as one note, you could have read Reality as one note. And I think that the common factor is that I pull out the layers, I pull out the depth, I pull out the empathy for a terrible situation or a terrible person.’
‘Reality’ is former NSA translator Reality Winner (yes, that’s her real name) who in 2018 was handed the longest-ever prison sentence imposed for the unauthorised release of government documents after leaking intelligence relating to Russian interference in the 2016 US elections (she was released in 2021). Reality, Tina Satter’s directorial debut, is a deft, claustrophobic three-hander of a film, documenting her arrest in which the dialogue is taken directly from the interrogation transcripts. Filming took place over 16 days.
Reality is Sweeney’s most challenging role to date. Yes, there were the technical tests — memorising the dialogue verbatim, the short shoot — but there was also responsibility to Reality and the Winner family to consider. Normally when prepping for a role, Sweeney builds character books ‘about my character’s life from the day they’re born to the first page of the script’ to help her create their worlds; this time she had a real person’s life to go on.
Sweeney’s performance is electrifying: unflashy, heartbreaking, nuanced. When the film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival the critics declared it a triumph, but the biggest compliment came from Reality’s mum, who told her she had seen her daughter the whole time. ‘I started crying, it was such an amazing feeling. I was really proud.’ Sweeney’s hope is that the film will act as ‘a bipartisan lens on to a moment in history’ and allow people to come to their own conclusions about what happened and why. It’s also about rehumanising a young woman who, as Sweeney puts it, was reduced ‘to a bunch of head-lines and tabloids’.
I just never accepted failure. I hated the answer ‘no’. I knew I had to keep working
Sweeney has also been put through the ringer by the gossip mill; her family, her love life, her body all subject to scrutiny. She doesn’t feel famous, but also admits she can’t remember the last time she walked in somewhere and someone hasn’t said hi. ‘I think I’m still navigating it on a daily basis because I want to be as authentic and genuinely open to the public and my fans as possible. And I think I am. I talk a lot, I’m very open and it’ll probably be to my detriment, but I don’t know how people can hide behind an image,’ she says. ‘At the same time, I don’t owe people answers. I’m a very private person when it comes to my family and relationships. I want people to know who I am as an individual but also, I feel that I should still be allowed to have my own peace and private life as well. It’s a weird balance, I’m definitely still figuring it out.’
Okay, I say, given all the projection she is subject to, what would she like people to take from this interview? ‘That I’m still growing. I’m still a 25-year-old girl who’s growing up under the lens of the public. And I’m still trying to figure out so much.’
The real her is goofy; ‘Syd’ to her friends and family. ‘I just like to be Syd. Sharing my love for cars, sharing my love for Tank, how I grew up on a lake, and I ski and getting to share that is me wanting to give as much of myself to people so they can see that I’m a real human being.’
In lockdown Sweeney bought herself her dream car, a vintage Bronco, and set about restoring it at her friend’s dad’s garage. Then, illustrating the fact that she can’t be pigeonholed, the girl in the five-star suite wearing the designer PJs starts explaining how she had figured out how ‘to remove the transmission, change it from drum brakes to disk brakes, remove the transfer case and change the suspension and the shocks and the engine. I learnt as much as I could, there’s still so much more to learn. I loved it.’
Sweeney also loves being in the figurative driving seat. In 2020, she set up her own production company, Fifty-Fifty Films. She was 22. I could hardly wash and feed myself until I was 30, I tell her. Where did she find the discipline to do that? ‘I’m a huge doer. I’m not someone who likes to sit back and’ — she puts on a weary, tedious voice — ‘talk and talk it out. I plan, I love to plan, but I don’t like it when people talk about things they’re going to do. I like when I see people actually doing it.’
That gung-ho attitude has been with her since childhood. Growing up in Spokane near the Idaho-Washington border, as soon as she could walk and talk, she was performing. ‘I had imaginary friends and all these imaginary worlds and when I realised that movies and TV shows were basically these imaginary worlds brought to life, I was like, “Oh my God, this is real?”’ She begged her parents to let her be an actor but, understandably, to them ‘it was like wanting to be a princess’.
Then fate intervened when a small indie film came to her town. Sweeney got wind of it and wanted to audition. So, she utilised her moxie and ‘put together a five-year business plan presentation about what could happen if they let me audition for this. They were like, “Oh, shit, she’s very serious, she’s not gonna shut up about this,”’ she laughs. She was 12. She ended up booking the part, ‘and had the time of my life. It was such a small, stupid movie but it was the start of it all. And my parents I think fell in love with the exciting newness of the world.’
It was the start, but it wasn’t a quick story from there. It would be another 10 years bouncing between LA and Spokane before she started booking those turning-point jobs. How did she hang in there? ‘I just never accepted failure. I hated the answer “no”. And I felt a responsibility to my family because I felt like we gave up and sacrificed so much for a dream that a little girl had. And I knew that I had to just keep going and keep working, and keep working really, really hard — work my ass off — because I couldn’t do anything else. I didn’t dream of anything else.’
Given the recent nepo baby dialogue, there is something uplifting about seeing someone who wasn’t born with her name on the list rising to the top of the notoriously closed-door acting world. ‘I wasn’t born and raised into this industry, I went to school, I have many of the same exact experiences as everyday Americans,’ she says without a hint of bitterness. To the no-connections kids who want to take a shot at acting, Sweeney says: ‘You gotta want it so bad that you’re gonna work harder and harder and harder every single day. And you’ve gotta love what you do, because if you don’t love it — then it’s not worth it.’ For Sweeney, it is all proving worth it. Next up is the crime thriller Americana. She has just returned from Australia filming her first romcom, Anyone But You, that she produced and stars in alongside Glen Powell. ‘It was a blast... A beautiful summer camp experience.’ There is also Immaculate, a psychological horror that Sweeney produced, and the Marvel movie Madame Web coming up, about which details are ‘under lock and key!’
You could tell me, but you’d have to kill me kind of thing? ‘I’d have to honestly kill myself!’ she laughs. Tomorrow morning she has a 6am call time to start filming Apple Studios’ Echo Valley, with Julianne Moore. And then, when she returns to LA in the autumn to film Euphoria season three, she has a couple more project cars she plans to work on. ‘[The garage] will be my Syd-home-Zen place.’
For now, however, it’s time to get ready. ‘I’m so jealous of the girls that fit in the shoes and can just rock those carpets and I’m like wobbling, hoping I don’t fall. But these shoes that Miu Miu custom made me fit perfectly. So she’ll be able to walk, and she’ll be able to serve,’ she laughs. And serve she will. A few hours later she will exit The Carlyle and turn on her full voltage star power, because when Sydney Sweeney puts her mind to something, you better believe she’s going to do it.
‘Reality’ opens in cinemas on 2 Jun.
Photographer: Donavon Smallwood
Stylist: Marissa Baklayan
Hair: Glen Coco at PRTNERS
Make-up: Melissa Hernandez at The Wall Group using Armani Beauty
Co-Producers: Taylor LaTorre at Navia Vision and Nicole Holcroft-Emmess
On-set Producer: Bri Estelle Scrivens
Photographer’s Assistant: Noah Bogusz
Digi Tech: Jason Riker
