Kim Novak has shared her disapproval over the casting of Sydney Sweeney as herself in the upcoming biopic, Scandalous.
The 93-year-old actor said she would have “never approved” the film, which charts her relationship with musician Sammy Davis Jr in the 1950s and the intense racial prejudice they faced.
Sweeney has been cast as Novak, while Industry actor David Jonsson is set to play Davis in the Colman Domingo-directed biopic.
Novak claimed The White Lotus star, 28, “sticks out so much above the waist” and worried the film will focus too heavily on her sexual relationship with Davis.
“There’s no way it wouldn’t be a sexual relationship because Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time,” Novak told The Times. “She was totally wrong to play me.”
Sweeney - whose character on the hit TV show Euphoria is set to become an OnlyFans model - has not responded publicly to the comments.
In October, she said she was “incredibly honoured” to play Novak.
“I think her story is still very relevant today in that she dealt with Hollywood and scrutiny with her relationships and her own private life and the control of her image,” Sweeney told People at the time.
“And I think that for me, I relate to it in a lot of different ways.
Novak - who was synonymous with the Golden Age of Hollywood - met Davis in the mid 1950s when they appeared as guests on The Steve Allen Show.
They began a secret relationship due to society’s attitude to interracial relationships at the time.
Novak was signed to Columbia Pictures and its co-founder Harry Cohn reportedly threatened Davis with a mob hit when he found out about their romance, claiming Novak dating a Black man would hurt box office sales.
This led to the pair’s separation.
Novak, who served as the dual face of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo among other notable titles, took issue with the Scandalous film title last year.
“I don’t think the relationship was scandalous,” she told the Guardian in August.
“He’s somebody I really cared about. We had so much in common, including that need to be accepted for who we are and what we do, rather than how we look.”
In 2024, Sweeney debunked the entertainment industry’s message about female empowerment.
It came after a female producer in Hollywood is said to have disparaged the Anyone But You star’s physical appearance and talent earlier this year.
“It’s very disheartening to see women tear other women down, especially when women who are successful in other avenues of their industry see younger talent working really hard – hoping to achieve whatever dreams that they may have – and then trying to bash and discredit any work that they’ve done,” she told Vanity Fair as part of its Hollywood issue.
Sweeney, who recently appeared in a controversial jeans campaign, went on: “This entire industry, all people say is ‘Women empowering other women’. None of it’s happening.
“All of it is fake and a front for all the other s**t that they say behind everyone’s back.”
“I’ve read that our entire lives, we were raised – and it’s a generational problem – to believe only one woman can be at the top,” Sweeney said.
“There’s one woman who can get the man. There’s one woman who can be, I don’t know, anything.
“So then all the others feel like they have to fight each other or take that one woman down instead of being like, Let’s all lift each other up.
“I’m still trying to figure it out. I’m just trying my best over here. Why am I getting attacked?”
Earlier that year, Father Of The Bride and Buffy The Vampire Slayer producer Carol Baum reportedly critiqued Sweeney while speaking with a New York Times film critic before a screening of her 1988 film Dead Ringers.
During the conversation, Baum is said to have referenced the production class she teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, saying: “I said to my class ‘explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty, she can’t act. Why is she so hot?’.”
A representative for Sweeney later said: “How sad that a woman in the position to share her expertise and experience chooses instead to attack another woman.”
