It’s always been reductive to diminish Sweeney to the most salacious elements of her TV roles, but the actress is making interesting career choices as she ventures more into film, including her latest horror project, ‘Immaculate’
When Sydney Sweeney hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time earlier this month, it was a fairly lackluster affair.
With the exception of an amusing sketch in which cast member Bowen Yang was revealed” to be straight and in turn seduced Sweeney, the episode will go down as barely a footnote in the annals of SNL.
Conversely, there was plenty of attention paid to Sweeney’s appearance on the show.
Conservative commentators latched on to a harebrained narrative that Sweeney’s cleavage was meant to own the libs;
in fact, one of the biggest national newspapers in Canada ran an op-ed with the lede “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” (We live in cursed times.)
Another meaningless debate about wokeness is one thing; it’s even weirder when the conversation is centered on someone’s body. It’s a phenomenon that Sweeney is familiar with.
As she joked in her SNL monologue, she’s known as “the girl on TV who screams, cries, and has sex—sometimes all three at the same time.”
Seeing as most of the episode poked fun at the hyperfixation on Sweeney’s attractiveness, the ensuing news cycle felt like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“People feel connected and free to be able to speak about me in whatever way they want, because they believe that I’ve signed my life away,”
Sweeney recently explained in an interview with Variety. “It’s this weird relationship that people have with me that I have no control or say over.”
Of course, it’s always been reductive to diminish Sweeney to the most salacious elements of her TV roles.
Though her portrayal of Cassie Howard in HBO’s Euphoria, which premiered in 2019, is widely credited for putting Sweeney on the map, it was a trio of performances from the previous year that first demonstrated her acting chops. Between supporting roles in Netflix’s short-lived dramedy Everything Sucks!,
Hulu’s Emmy-winning drama The Handmaid’s Tale, and the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects, Sweeney conveyed the kind of intensity and vulnerability that’s since become her calling card.
Throw in her performance as Olivia Mossbacher in the first season of The White Lotus—a character whose mix of ruthlessness and insecurity puts Regina George to shame—and it’s clear that there are few actors from Sweeney’s generation who are better at capturing teen angst. (FYI, Cassie has never, ever been happier.)
But since Sweeney’s previous roles have had a shorter shelf life—Everything Sucks! was canceled after one season, her character is tragically killed in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Sharp Objects and The White Lotus were one-offs—Euphoria has inevitably loomed large over the rest of her young career.
And despite the plaudits that Sweeney has received for Euphoria, including an Emmy nomination in 2022, there’s always a sense that the work is somewhat overshadowed by all the attention paid to Cassie’s nude scenes. “This is something that has bothered me for a while,”
Sweeney told The Independent in 2022. “I’m very proud of my work in Euphoria. I thought it was a great performance. But no one talks about it because I got naked.”