In March 2024, David Michôd was considering his options for the role of trailblazing boxer Christy Martin. It was a limited pool — the part, which involves both fighting in the ring and brutal physical abuse at the hands of Christy’s Svengali husband and trainer, James Martin, would be punishing. Sydney Sweeney wasn’t high on the list. She wasn’t on the list at all.
“I think people have preconceived ideas about Sydney because she is such a contemporary 21st-century creature of the internet,” the Australian director notes. Her stardom precedes her, and Michôd had to see Sweeney in a role in which she shed it. A friend suggested he check out Tina Satter’s 2023 Berlin Film Festival sensation “Reality,” about convicted intelligence leaker Reality Winner. Around the same time, an associate casually mentioned that Sweeney had trained and competed as an MMA fighter from the age of 12 until she booked the pilot for “Euphoria” at 19.
Sami Drasin for Variety Magazine
“I already thought there was something interesting about Sydney, but ‘Reality’ made me know in my bones that she had some real acting chops. That movie is written from FBI transcripts,” Michôd says. “That isn’t easy to act, and I thought her performance was astonishing.”
As he conducted a deep dive on Sweeney’s grappling and kickboxing exploits, Michôd began to feel goose bumps. He had worked with great-fit A-listers like Brad Pitt (“War Machine”) and Robert Pattinson (“The Rover”). “But I’ve had this experience only once before, with Timmy Chalamet on ‘The King,’” he says. “I’ve found someone who would be perfect.” Michôd sent Sweeney the script he’d co-written with Mirrah Foulkes. She read it while flying to Barcelona to shoot an Armani campaign. Within 24 hours, they jumped on a Zoom.
Eighteen months later — and one week before her 28th birthday — Sweeney rolls into a private dining room at Toronto’s Ritz-Carlton a minute early. She might have arrived even earlier, had she not just run into Martin in the hotel lobby. After our interview, she and the woman she plays will take the stage following their Toronto Film Festival screening; Sweeney will sob amid a rapturous (and rare for TIFF) standing ovation. As we speak, though, Sweeney has no idea that the outsize response she’s about to receive will catapult her into the heart of Oscar speculation.
Wearing beige linen shorts, an oversize tan sweater and cowboy boots, Sweeney looks fresh and alert despite the 9 a.m. meet time. A pair of round brilliant-cut diamond earrings offers the only clue that she’s one of the highest-paid stars of Hollywood’s under-30 set, with four producing credits already under her belt. As she sinks into a chair, Sweeney considers the parallels between Martin’s fight in the ring and her own battle for control in the industry.
“For Christy, the ring was her escape. It’s almost like you’re a caged animal inside this ring, but it’s a place where she feels the most free,” Sweeney notes.
Does she feel like a caged animal in Hollywood?
“I am definitely a caged animal in a sense,” she says. “Acting is my ring. It’s where I feel freedom. The set is where everything else goes quiet.”
Off set, the noise is deafening for Sweeney, who became a household name over the past two years thanks to a red-hot acting career as well as an American Eagle jeans ad that launched a thousand hot takes. The ad’s declaration that Sweeney has “good jeans” (read: “genes”) got slammed by, for instance, a Columbia University professor as “imbued with eugenic messaging.” President Trump praised the ad. Amid the cacophony, the company’s stock price soared.
Over the next seven weeks, she has two movies hitting theaters. On Nov. 7, prestige producer and first-time distributor Black Bear will launch “Christy,” which saw Sweeney transform beyond recognition, packing on some 30 pounds of muscle and sustaining at least one concussion. That’s followed on Dec. 19 by Lionsgate’s “The Housemaid,” a psychological thriller in the vein of “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” that is “testing through the roof,” according to the film’s director, Paul Feig, and appears poised for Christmas counterprogramming breakout status. Sweeney produced both films through her Fifty-Fifty banner.
All the while, the conversation surrounding Sweeney often overshadows her credentials, like two Emmy nominations — for her respective teen-ennui turns on HBO’s “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus” — as well as a $220 million box office hit with Sony’s “Anyone but You,” which cost a mere $25 million.
Here at the festival, one sees just what kind of cage constrains Sweeney. At a Black Bear party, gotcha reporters and leering industry types jockey to meet her. She’s exceedingly polite as one after another whips out their phone to take a selfie with her. All the while, she deflects every question about the jeans ad with a warm smile and a firm “I’m so excited for everybody to see Christy Martin.”
“It took me years to learn what Sydney knows, which is ‘Just don’t react,’” says Feig, who calls the ad controversy “manufactured” by “a certain segment of the media [who] blew it up” to serve an anti-woke agenda. (To wit: Megyn Kelly deemed the ad a success, declaring on her show, “We miss attractive people. We are sick of trying to pretend that these objectively unattractive people are the new beauty standard.”)
Feig continues: “She’s probably one of the most confident people I’ve ever met in my life — in a good way. She’s very savvy. ‘Savvy’ sounds calculated. With her, she’s just very smart about publicity, about social media, about what people are looking for on social media. As we’re getting ready to promote, we’re always like, ‘Oh, let’s do this. This is the hot trend on TikTok right now.’ And she’s like, ‘No, that was last month. Here’s the hot trend.’”
Good genes notwithstanding, Sweeney never skated through an audition back when she was a rural Idaho teen trying to break into Hollywood.
“I have very strong eyebrow muscles,” she says as she demonstrates an impressive brow furrow. “And I had someone tell me to fix my face or else I’m not going to make it. I should get Botox. I was 16! Or I’m in a casting and I’m reading my scene and the casting director is eating a bag of chips, and I’m like, ‘You’re not paying attention at all.’”
But the smart ones were noticing.
Mike White remembers auditioning actresses for Season 1 of “White Lotus.” He wrote the part of Olivia Mossbacher as an intellectually pretentious bully. Some hopefuls delivered the lines as zingers, with a comedic precision. Sweeney took a more diffident approach, diverging from how he pictured the part.
“There was just something very unaffected by her,” White says. “She was very likable. And I thought that that would be helpful because the part is so unlikable on the page. Then in editing, you realize she just pops on-screen. She’s obviously lovely in person and photogenic. But my eyes kept going to her, no matter who’s in the scene with her. That’s natural screen magnetism that is hard to quantify. She just has that. I don’t know what makes somebody a star, but there is something about her that just is.”
By her own admission, Sweeney prefers flawed archetypes, which actresses rarely tackle — with notable exceptions like Cate Blanchett in “Tár.”
“I tend to gravitate towards characters that are stereotypically unlikable, and I like to challenge an audience to have empathy for that person,” she says. “Olivia was that — a very hard-hitting, Gen Z, in-your-face kind of girl.”
Still, likable has its advantages, as evidenced by the success of “Anyone but You,” which sent the internet aflutter over her chemistry with co-star Glen Powell. She and Powell seemed to lean into the mystery of their coupledom — a throwback strategy perfected during the Golden Age of cinema.
“Honestly, the press did it themselves. There was no leaning in, per se,” she insists. “Truly the tabloids and journalists just created it and kept going. Even if we were just standing next to each other, it was ‘They’re standing two inches apart!’ Glen and I genuinely care for each other and have a love and respect for one another. I love being with him. And I think people just truly saw a really beautiful pairing.”
As far as Sweeney is concerned, that pairing could be revived at any given moment via a sequel.
“We are always open to it,” she says. “I think that when the right concept and script come to Glen and I, we will jump in hand in hand.”
Perhaps it’s a testament to Sweeney’s acting prowess that audiences can’t separate her from the characters she plays, fueling the incessant conversation about her.
“I play a lot of very divisive characters, and I think that a lot of people think they know me, but they don’t. So when people think, ‘Ah, she’s a sex symbol,’ or ‘She’s leaning into that,’ I’m like, ‘No, I just feel good and I’m doing it for myself and I feel strong.’ And I hope that I can inspire other women to be confident and just flaunt what they got and feel good because you shouldn’t have to apologize or hide or cover up in any room,” says Sweeney, hinting at the jeans uproar.
“Christy” co-star Ben Foster, who plays Christy’s homicidal husband, warns against allowing the circus to define the performer.
“There always seems to be a bit of hoopla around her. Positive or negative, she seems to provoke a reaction. But that is not the person I first met,” Foster says. “I only know Syd as a sensitive human, utterly professional, kind to the crew, prepared, looked everybody in the eye, remembered their names. To me that’s an old-school value system that I don’t see in a lot of people in her position.”
The festival offers a brief respite from production on the third and final season of “Euphoria,” though Sweeney’s co-stars are also making their presence known: The previous night, Sweeney hit the premiere of “Mile End Kicks,” which stars friend and former castmate Barbie Ferreira, and the following night, she’ll attend the premiere of Maude Apatow’s directorial debut, “Poetic License.”
The heavy “Euphoria” representation on the TIFF red carpet testifies to just how fully the series has conquered culture. Season 3 promises to “blow a lot of people away,” Sweeney teases.
The bonds formed on the show run deep. One relationship was cut short prematurely when star Angus Cloud died of a drug overdose at 25. “It was definitely a very emotional experience to go back to a set and not have him be there with you. He was such a special person, and he was taken way too young,” says Sweeney. She was in Idaho when she learned of Cloud’s death. “I’m glad I was home because I was surrounded by my family. I think my first call was Maude, and then Jacob [Elordi], and we were all just crying on the phone together. It’s not something you want to bring people back together over, but I’m thankful to have my castmates to be able to process all of that together.”
In early November, she will wrap production, closing the book on the approval-starved Cassie Howard. White would love to have her reprise Olivia on Season 4 of “White Lotus.” “I don’t know if we could afford her now,” he says. “As of now, it doesn’t look like that’s gonna happen.” Sweeney, whose off-set pleasures include kitesurfing and cliff diving, says she wants to run “The Amazing Race” with White: “Honestly, Mike and I would be a killer team.”
White, who competed in Seasons 14 and 18 of the show with his father, is thrilled by the prospect, noting Sweeney’s physicality but also her ability to play the social game. “I would definitely win with her. She’s the master at getting what she wants. And I mean that in an absolutely good way,” he says.
Then again, she could hit similar far-flung locations by playing a Bond girl, something Amazon founder Jeff Bezos reportedly wants very much to happen. She did attend his wedding to Lauren Sánchez in June, and the trio are tangentiallyin business together on Sweeney’s new lingerie line. When I ask if there’s any truth to the Bond rumors, Sweeney unravels for the first and only time.
“I can’t. [Seven-second pause.] I don’t know. [Ten-second pause.] To be honest, I don’t know all the Bond rumors, but I’ve always been a huge fan of the franchise, and I’m excited and curious to see what they do with it,” she says.
But would she be interested? As she mulls the possibility, she regains her composure and answers assuredly.
“Depends on the script,” she says. “I think I’d have more fun as James Bond.”
The internet will obsess about the possibility. Or move on to another Sweeney subplot. Lately, the haters scrutinize pictures of the actress for signs of cosmetic work.
“I’ve never gotten anything done. I’m absolutely terrified of needles. No tattoos. Nothing. I’m going to age gracefully,” she says. “It’s really funny. I’ll see things online like ‘comparison pictures.’ I’m like, ‘I’m 12 in that photo. Of course I’m going to look different. I have makeup on now and I’m 15 years older.’”
But Sweeney drives attention. And though the opportunists will try to attract eyeballs by mentioning her name, she’s firmly in control.
“Being an actress, it’s a lot harder to stand in the room and demand your worth and for people to look at you and value you,” she says. “I have to remind myself like, ‘Hey, Syd, you’re actually powerful. Stand up a little taller.’”
Charity Spotlight: The National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence
In the film “Christy,” the domestic abuse red flags emerge early before reaching a third-act crescendo. It was not just a literary device for screenwriters David Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes. Their script follows the real-life tragic arc of boxing legend Christy Martin, who suffered horrific acts of violence at the hands of her husband and trainer, the late James Martin.
For Sydney Sweeney, who gives a mesmerizing performance as the knockout queen of the ’90s, Martin’s story is common but also familiar.
“It’s a very personal issue that’s important to me, and I hope that through Christy and her story, it can raise more awareness,” Sweeney says without elaborating on how the legacy of domestic violence has touched her.
“It’s personal,” she repeats, her blue eyes flashing pain.
Sweeney has selected the National Center on Domestic and Sexual Violence as her charity. Founded in 1998, the Texas-based nonprofit “provides and customizes training and consultation, influences policy, promotes collaboration, and enhances diversity with the goal of ending” the scourge.
While film critics typically lead with the physical transformation that Sweeney pulled off, equally impressive is her ability to delve into the psyche of a woman who was fearless in the ring but rightfully terrified of the man closest to her.
Ben Foster, who plays James, says the abuse scenes tested their limits as performers, but Michôd “created a safe space for us to explore” the power dynamics of an abusive home.
“As we got deeper into the material and closer to shooting, all I could see is this sensitive human,” he says of his co-star. “And I could feel that she felt a great responsibility to represent Christy’s resilience the best she could and bring her own lantern to it. And Syd’s lantern is bright.”
Styling: Molly Dickson/With Falcon; Hair: Glen Oropeza/The Partners; Makeup: Melissa Hernandez/A-Frame/Armani Beauty; Manicure: Zola Ganzorigt/The Wall Group/OPI; Dress: Victoria Beckham; Shoes: Andrea Wazen; Jewelry: Anita Ko
