The key to Sydney Sweeney, discourse magnet and actor, used to be Madame Web. It was an infamous disaster of a Spider-Man spin-off in early 2024, famed for flopping, and for lengthy scenes in which its star – a perpetually bemused Dakota Johnson – couldn’t seem to open a can of Coke. On the film’s press tour, Johnson seemed to be mortified that she was headlining such a thing, practically begging audiences not to see it from beneath her trademark fringe. Sweeney, a supporting player in the film and a nascent superstar at the time of its release, took a different approach: Madame Web was a business deal, she said, and a professional means to an end.
“To me, that film was a building block; it’s what allowed me to build a relationship with Sony,” Sweeney told GQ in the aftermath of the movie’s release. “Without doing Madame Web, I wouldn’t have a relationship with the decision-makers over there. Everything in my career I do not just for that story, but strategic business decisions.”
