This article about Sydney Sweeney is published in issue 28-29 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until July 16, 2024.
Ten years ago Sydney Sweeney she was just a little girl with a dream bigger than her. Originally from Spokane, Washington, raised in a fairly conservative family with no contact with the entertainment world, as a teenager she did what many of her peers did: auditions accompanied by her parents, in the hope of getting a part. One of these was Cecilia, a girl who lives in a girls’ boarding school in Ireland and who becomes pregnant as a virgin, is the protagonist of a horror film on the theme of control of the female body by the institutions and the men who lead them. That film was titled Immaculate – The Chosen Onebut it will never be filmed.
Fast forward and Sydney Sweeney is a star. Her career has taken a sudden turn, everyone is talking and writing about her, her body is being analyzed and politicized, newspapers are writing report cards with her looks, fashion houses are competing to undress her, the gossip is endless. In short, what happens to an actress when Hollywood decides it’s her moment.
“I don’t know why, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the role of Cecilia,” she says when we reach her by phone for this interview while she’s on break on an unspecified set. “I thought about it so much, until one day, after I learned that Immaculate – The Chosen One had never been shot, I said to myself: what if I did it? What if I produced it myself? I called my agent, I had the script recovered, I contacted the original screenwriter Andrew Lobel and I started talking about it with the producer Dave Bernad and with the director Michael Mohan, who had already directed me twice”. The result arrives in theaters on July 11, after having already been released in the United States in March and having received excellent reviews, also and above all for her performance. Compared to the first draft, Immaculate by Sydney Sweeney instead of Ireland takes place in Italy, in a conventand Cecilia is a young nun who arrives from America. When she becomes pregnant, despite never having had sexual intercourse, she is greeted as the new Virgin Mary and for her and for the spectators the real horror begins. Deaths, mutilations, tortures, secrets, blood, blood, blood: Cecilia and her body become the means through which Father Tedeschi conducts his crazy experiments, the container managed by others and over which she no longer has any rights. «Rosemary’s Baby It was definitely the film that inspired us the most,” she says proudly. «We shot in Rome. I love your country. My production partner, not long before, had been filming in Italy The White Lotusso he had a great group of people that he also brought to the set of Immaculate – The Chosen One. The only problem was the locations: the Church prevented us from accessing some places where we wanted to shoot, so we had to cut and adapt some scenes».
The girl “with a big imagination”, as she described herself to Jimmy Fallon, made it, even if “it was a little harder than I imagined”. Even today, the comment of a casting director rings in her ears: he told her that she would never work in television because she didn’t have the right look. Even today, at 26, she has her own production company – founded in 2020 together with her boyfriend, the entrepreneur Jonathan Davino – with which last year she produced (and starred in) the romantic comedy Everyone except you.
The film started off quietly but quickly became a phenomenon thanks to word of mouth and TikTok being flooded with videos of people re-doing the end credits sequence, where the main characters dance and sing Natasha Bedingfield’s 2004 single. Unwritten. Till today Everyone except you grossed more than $200 million, breathing new life into a genre that had almost disappeared, and it did so thanks to an excellent script, a great cast, and the chemistry between the two leads (the other is Glen Powell, who is also a star by now). “It’s easier for a guy: you make a movie that does well and then you’re offered any role. I still hear comments like: ‘But can she act?’ Hollywood’s chauvinism, except that today young people like Sweeney (and before her Reese Witherspoon, Emma Stone, Charlize Theron, Margot Robbie, to name a few), instead of sitting at home waiting for the phone to ring with the role of a lifetime, take the reins of their own career and build it as they want.
Sydney’s passion for acting goes back a long way, having discovered it as a child when a film crew came to her city to shoot a movie. At 11, to convince her parents of the seriousness of her intentions, she prepared a PowerPoint presentation in which she outlined a five-year plan for success. It worked. “They always believed in me. I was still a minor and they accompanied me to the first auditions, taking on 18 hours of travel and often sleeping in the car.”
A first small success comes with the part of Emaline Addario in the Netflix production Everything Sucks!which revolves around two groups of high school students in Oregon in 1996. Then came the miniseries Sharp Objectswhere she plays Alice, the mentally challenged girl that the protagonist Amy Adams meets when she is admitted to a psychiatric hospital. In between are the film Under the Silver Lake with Andrew Garfield, the second season of the The Handmaid’s Tale And Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood with Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. The turning point, however, came in 2019 thanks to the cult series Euphoria starring Zendaya: in the fragile and vulnerable role of Cassie is nominated for an Emmy in 2022. And it’s not the only nomination of the year: she also receives it for her role as Olivia in the first, wonderful season of The White Lotus. It is the consecration.
Since then Sydney Sweeney has never made a mistake, capable of juggling TV, big productions and small independent films, such as Realitythe true story of Reality Winner, a Persian translator who works for a government agency and steals secret documents that prove Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. «I fell in love with acting because it allows me to experience different lives. In art there is no right way to pursue a career. I don’t want to play the same character forever, what excites me is changing, taking risks, learning.”
The character that many would like to stick on her is that of the “girl who screams, cries and has sex on TV”, to use the same words she used during the comedy program Saturday Night Live. “Sometimes all three at the same time.” A joke to play with the image that the public has now formed of her, also thanks to a body that speaks for itself and that the actress has no problem showing off.
The result is that the conversation about her beauty has reached a political level in the US. After her appearance at the SNL commentator Amy Hamm, in the conservative magazine National Post, wrote that “her B cup size is the harbinger of the death of woke culture,” arguing as follows: “We’ve spent years being berated for desiring or admiring beauty—because beauty is rare and exclusionary, and to exclude is to hate—or so we’ve been berated by diversity, equity, and inclusion fanatics. We shouldn’t be admiring Sweeney’s beauty, but we do anyway. Times are a-changin’.” “Boobs are back!” she retorted. The Spectatorrejoicing for the return of a model of woman that in the conservative vision is more in line with what is expected of the female gender: staying at home, possibly having children, taking care of one’s appearance, adhering to an ideal of beauty that populates men’s dreams. A conversation, that on the return of breasts, that not even the New Yorker with the article We must defend the bustin which Sweeney is cited as having instigated, against her will, the rekindling of the debate. “I have no control over what people think or write about me,” she comments. “People feel free to talk about me as they want, because they believe that I have given up my life. That I am no longer human, because I am an actress.”
We were talking about this interview done on the phone from a mysterious set: the suspicion is that it was that of Euphoria. After a two-year break, we know that the third season will be made. «For me Euphoria it’s home,” Sydney says before going back to talking about Immaculate and the final scene, that of the birth: a long sequence in which, covered in blood, she lets out “a scream of collective female rage”, as the critic wrote Vulture. «What you see on the screen is the first take. We didn’t do any rehearsals, we just set up the camera and shot. Having already worked with the director (Michael Mohaned.) I felt comfortable enough to let go of a scream that contains everything: fear, freedom, pain, anger.”
The political significance of the film has not escaped American critics. a film that talks about forced pregnancy at a time when in the US the issue of abortion – after the Supreme Court two years ago overturned the ruling that protected it at a federal level – is at the centre of the debate and could even decide the next presidential election. “I don’t want to suggest what this film means or what messages are behind it, because I think that’s what’s beautiful about art: different people can look at something and still have different reactions. If Immaculate it serves to start a conversation, to spark discussion, then welcome”. A comment that signals that she wants to stay away from politics, as well as from conversations about her body. Except then to use irony. Like when she posts a photo on her Instagram with a sweatshirt with the writing: «Sorry for having great tits (sorry for having great tits)ed.)».
Cover photo Beau Grealy
Service Naomi Smith
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Source: Vanity Fair
I’m Susan Karen, a professional writer and editor at World Stock Market. I specialize in Entertainment news, writing stories that keep readers informed on all the latest developments in the industry. With over five years of experience in creating engaging content and copywriting for various media outlets, I have grown to become an invaluable asset to any team.
