On last week’s episode of Platonic, Seth Rogen and Beck Bennett rhapsodize about the attractiveness of Sydney Sweeney. Their appreciation manages to be simultaneously crude (“She’s stacked”), onomatopoetic (“She’s ridonk-adonk”), and even architectural (“She’s cantilevered, she’s like a Frank Lloyd Wright building”), though Bennett later insists that his admiration is intellectual as well as physical (“She was the head of her high school robotics team!”). It’s a playful sequence that also proves to be vaguely prophetic, because right now Sydney Sweeney is, in pop-culture terms, Having A Moment.
To be clear, I am not referring to her American Eagle jeans ad, which dropped last month and whose purported backlash (read: a handful of people kvetched about it online) ignited a counter-assault of manufactured right-wing outrage (about “wokeness,” or whatever). I’m instead talking about the arc of Sweeney’s career: an ongoing refinement that blends sex appeal, actorly talent, and interesting choices. Put those qualities together, and you have the makings of a true-blue movie star.
Or maybe not. Sweeney’s most recent big-screen credit is Americana, Tony Tost’s neo-Western, which was filmed several years ago but which clunked its way into theaters last weekend. If you haven’t heard of it, you aren’t alone; its original production company, Bron, went bankrupt in 2023, and its new distributor, Lionsgate, mustered a marketing effort that could charitably be described as pitiful. It’s a shame, and not just because Americana happens to be pretty good—a taut and ambitious noir with a slick screenplay and some intriguing ideas about gender roles and U.S. imperialism. The movie also represents a meaningful step in Sweeney’s continual evolution from “it girl” to bona fide actress.
It’s a journey that’s taken some time. Sweeney turns just 28 next month, but she already has a lengthy list of esoteric credits dating back to 2009. It wasn’t until 2018, though, that she gained a measure of recognition, appearing in three different TV shows: the second season of The Handmaid’s Tale, where she plays the child bride of a conflicted official in a dystopian patriarchy; Sharp Objects, which casts her as a troubled mental patient opposite Amy Adams’ younger self; and Everything Sucks, where she portrays the closeted heroine’s object of ardent longing. Of those series, Everything Sucks is by far the least memorable, but it’s also the one that most visibly leverages Sweeney’s emergent screen presence—brassy physicality, bold emotional swings—in a way that correlated with her big break.
That, of course, would be Euphoria, HBO’s sin-sational depiction of small-town high school life as a hotbed of vice and a den of criminality. Euphoria isn’t a subtle show, in part because creator Sam Levinson favors extremism over nuance, but Sweeney is the ideal ambassador of its heightened style. Whether in or out of her clothes (Levinson has no qualms about exploitation), she plays her character—an attachment-prone looker who’s vulnerable to severe mood swings—with a full-bodied commitment that’s less outrageous than simply fearless.
Speaking of full-bodied: Euphoria is one of many works that pay eager homage to Sweeney’s breasts, which are sufficiently prominent to inspire the sort of lascivious drooling as captured in that Platonic exchange. (Yesterday, a U.S. Senator debunked a deepfake in which she purportedly declared that Sweeney has “perfect titties.” What a country.) But as she smartly capitalized on her newfound fame to transition from the small screen to the big (while still delivering a crucial performance in The White Lotus), Sweeney managed to round out her persona, making sure that the public fervor over her body didn’t hide what she could do with her brain.
This isn’t to say that Sweeney’s movie appearances obscure her sensuality. In the coming-of-age vehicle Big Time Adolescence, she plays yet another vision of peak desirability not far removed from Everything Sucks, even as she quietly shades her character with layers of yearning and regret. In the Brian De Palma rip-off The Voyeurs, Michael Mohan’s camera feverishly pores over her form as her titular observer tumbles into a vertiginous spiral of danger and obsession. She even lent her prestige to Night Teeth, where she and Megan Fox cameo as scantily clad vampires whose mere presence is designed to elevate risible Netflix trash into something noteworthy for your algorithm.
Yet as her career has progressed and her celebrity has swelled (she hosted Saturday Night Live last year), Sweeney has embraced roles that emphasize her intelligence and acuity while tamping down her sexuality. Reality, in which she stars as an NSA analyst suspected of leaking classified documents, is a ground-level procedural whose dialogue is lifted verbatim from an FBI interrogation transcript; it is the absolute opposite of titillating. Immaculate, which Sweeney produced (and reteamed with Mohan as director), may be a nunsploitation flick, but it imagines her not as a carnal being, but as a demure virgin. Both movies lean heavily on her eyes, which she uses to convey uncertainty and fear, while paying little attention to anything below her shoulders.
The obvious exception to this trend is Anyone But You, the jaunty romantic comedy that broke out two Christmases ago. If Reality and Immaculate ignored Sweeney’s physical attributes, this one happily overcompensates, sending her to the beaches of Australia and filming her in a resplendent array of low-cut dresses and revealing bikinis. Anyone But You isn’t an especially good movie, but Sweeney and Glen Powell are so fucking hot in it that it’s a pleasurable enough diversion. Mainstream audiences certainly saw the appeal, as it raked in $88M domestic and $220M worldwide; setting aside her bit part in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, it’s Sweeney’s only theatrical credit that could reasonably be deemed a commercial hit.
Which brings me back to Americana. Tonally speaking, it’s a dramatic departure from Anyone But You, casting Sweeney as a shy waitress named Penny Jo who doesn’t bare an inch of skin, and who gets embroiled in a tangled noir plot involving stolen artifacts, subjugated women, and murderous traffickers. It’s a fun and engaging little movie, even if it largely plays as Coen Brothers Lite—except for the romance between Penny Jo and Lefty (Paul Walter Hauser), a warm and sweet paring which spikes this squalid tale with a dose of genuine tenderness.
It also explores a heretofore untapped feature of Sweeney’s arsenal: her voice. Penny Jo speaks in a halting stammer, an impediment that would seem to conflict with her simmering aspiration to become a famous country singer. It’s a potentially cheap tic that Sweeney vocalizes with quiet sincerity (and without undue embellishment), culminating in a lovely scene in which her bashful dreamer transforms into a potent musical force.
The financial failure of Americana—which various outlets, in a breathtaking display of post hoc ergo propter hoc, have noted comes in the wake of that American Eagle ad—hardly dooms Sweeney to a lifetime of anonymity. She currently has six different movies in various states of production (including Ron Howard’s Eden, which arrives in theaters tomorrow), and she’s demonstrated enough versatility that she likely has a future as a reliable character actress, even if she isn’t, say, the next Angelina Jolie.
Still, just as it’s boorish to brand Sweeney a talentless sexpot, it seems misguided to dismiss her chances of becoming a marquee attraction based on her current track record. Actors who can combine her looks, charisma, and zeitgesty je ne sais quoi aren’t all that common, and as the IP superhero boom subsides, the success of a picture like Anyone But You should remind Hollywood of the magnetizing power of actual movie stars. Even if Sydney Sweeney never wins an Oscar (and she might!), she’s proven she has what it takes to give audiences—and studio bean counters—that rare rush of euphoria.
Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.