Asked what the biggest misconception is about her, Sydney Sweeney laughs. “Oh, I don’t know. There’s so many out there. That would take the whole article, man.”
During her Saturday Night Live monologue in the spring, she poked fun at the box office failure of her superhero movie Madame Web, the controversy surrounding her mother’s supposedly MAGA-themed 60th birthday party, and even rumors that she and Anyone but You costar Glen Powell had an affair. “Hopefully people realize how silly all the headlines are because, I mean, you know how this works,” she says from North Carolina, where she’s filming a biopic about renowned boxer Christy Martin. “We’re going to have a conversation, we’ll talk for 30 minutes, it’s condensed, then people don’t understand the context behind the conversation, and it’s all clickbait. Unfortunately I don’t get to control my image—my image is in your guys’ hands.”
It’s a reality that the actor has been grappling with for a few years. Sweeney became a household name thanks to two HBO prestige dramas, Euphoria and The White Lotus. She earned Emmy nominations for both those performances in 2022, then launched her own production company, Fifty-Fifty Films.
With Euphoria season three delayed, she executive produced Anyone but You, which made over $220 million at the global box office, and rescued Immaculate, an indie horror film she’d auditioned for a decade earlier, from development hell. Next up, she’ll play a straightlaced German farm wife in Ron Howard’s Eden; star opposite Julianne Moore in Echo Valley, a thriller from the creator of Mare of Easttown; and—at some point—remake 1968’s Barbarella, which she hopes to collaborate on with Jane Fonda, despite the original star’s skepticism. “I cannot wait to hopefully have her part of the process,” says Sweeney. “We have locked in our writers, there’s a lot of thought going into it.”
We’re thrilled to have Sweeney as part of our 2025 Hollywood Issue. Here are excerpts from a conversation.
Vanity Fair: 2024 was the year that introduced you as a producer. What has having that autonomy over your work taught you?
Sydney Sweeney: I love being able to have a seat at the table, have creative say over decisions that would help benefit the project, whether it be the character or budget or time frame, anything that I can do that can help the project succeed. I love to help brainstorm and problem solve because it’s a puzzle—you’re constantly trying to have all these moving pieces put together.
