Sydney Sweeney Is Certainly The Full Package

Sydney Sweeney is certainly a lot of things.
A phenomenal actor, for starters. Charismatic, caring and kind—her gentle character shines through in any interview she’s in. Naturally beautiful. A fashion icon. A calming aura about her. Warm, highly-driven and a bundle of high-energy, like a battery. Whenever you see her walk a red carpet, or grace an interview she’s poised, soft-spoken, so articulate. She’s had a monumental rise to fame over the last couple of years with an elegant classic Hollywood style, often branded ‘an old-school movie star’ or ‘Gen-Z’s answer to Marilyn Munroe.’

The unique and cool thing about Sydney Sweeney that certainly sets her apart from the rest is her gift of playing the radiant young woman—bright-eyed. You can feel it oozing off her as she performs in one of her roles. Like as Cassie in Euphoria, or Olivia in The White Lotus. Sydney Sweeney is certainly the full package.

Born in 1997 in Spokane, Washington to a criminal defence lawyer and hospitality professional, Sydney grew up eight kilometres east of the Washington border in northern Idaho. Her family home was a cabin by a lake, away from any noisy inner-city hubbub. The small picturesque town was two streets long with a church, three bars and a small supermarket. Everyone knew everyone.

‘What’s so beautiful about the Pacific-Northwest is everything that you can do outdoors,’ Sweeney told Travel + Leisure at the start of this year.

Her parents encouraged her to follow her passions and faith in God, and ‘fall in love with as many things as possible’. She was quite shy and reserved, uncomfortable with her body and actively avoided doing anything that’d draw attention to her, like school plays or public speaking. So even the notion that she would one day be one of the hottest stars in Hollywood would’ve been a wild idea at this early stage in her life.

Back home at the cabin on weekends and after school, though, she used her imagination to create whole imaginary worlds. Reportedly, she regularly imagined herself as a secret agent, or a princess cheetah, or a teacher instructing a class of her ‘insect students’.

As well as being an avid learner (she attended Saint George’s private school through her childhood), she loved the beauty of the outdoors, which turned bitterly cold and snowy in the winter and then hot and toasty in the summer. With the wonderful outdoors at her fingertips, Sweeney’s list of hobbies grew and grew. She loved playing sports. Football, skiing, baseball, golf, and dancing ballet, to name but a few. Even more dangerous things like MMA and wakeboarding…

‘I think I was 11 or 12, I got in a wakeboarding accident and the board came up, sliced my face and I have a scar. I had to get a bunch of stitches,’ Sweeney told Sean Evans on Hot Ones in January this year. Ouch!

Sydney’s first taste of acting came in 2009 (after healing from the wakeboard incident) when a small-indie-comedy-zombie movie, ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction, was set to film in her hometown and hold auditions. She begged and begged and begged her parents to allow her to audition for it. After some resistance from her parents, the young Sydney wrote up a five-year business plan to present via Microsoft Powerpoint 2008. Ahhh, the good ol’ days.

‘They were like: “fine, let’s let her audition, and maybe she’ll be quiet,”’ Sweeney reminisced to C Magazine’s Rob Haskell.

The audition, as you can only guess, went without a hitch and she landed the non-speaking role of Lisa. Young Sydney had caught the acting bug then, and spent months and months to secure more auditions for herself trying to make her dreams come true. It’s interesting to add that Sydney was never obsessed with film and rarely watched TV. Acting was a natural thing to her, sort of like a life-force she found in her soul.

So she went searching for more. Calls started coming in from LA. More audition offers than you can wag a stick at. Before long her parents were driving 19 hours to-and-from California. She didn’t give up on her schooling or hobbies whilst pursuing her calling. She was still keeping on top of her school work, getting straight-A’s and even had become the president of the robotics club. She even taught herself Russian, for which she is fluent. Reportedly she identifies herself ‘as a bit of a nerd’.

The road to Cali did take its toll, however. ‘My mum, my dad, my brother and I were in a regular one-bedroom hotel room for nine months.’ My heart truly aches (and breaks) thinking about the cost of petrol. Their hearts must have ached too, as they decided—when Sydney turned 13—to move themselves from Idaho to Cali (probably to save on travel costs).
Having openly admitted her life wasn’t always spent living the big Hollywood dream, she joked to Associated Press in 2022 that her family were ‘the poor version of The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.’
‘There were many, many years where I got told “No” endlessly. I got told I wasn’t good enough, I would never make it, I wasn’t pretty enough—all the time.’
Reportedly, it took 100 auditions in LA and heaps of meetings with possible agents for Sydney to land her first roles as minor characters in shows such as 90210, Criminal Minds and Grey’s Anatomy.
It was in 2011, just starting up her career, she was nominated for her first set of Young Artist awards—for the short film, Takeo, and the TV series, Chase. Success was already heading her way.
Her first break-out role came in Netflix’s comedy-drama, Everything Sucks! which filmed in 2017 and hit the screens in 2018. That year was an important year for Sweeney, as the world became obsessed with the young star. In the series, Sweeney played Emaline Addario, a junior student in the fictional Boring High School drama club with a flair for the arts. Sydney took great inspiration from a certain early-2000’s pop-icon, Gwen Stefani.

‘Emaline is an overdramatic, insecure teenage girl,’ Sweeney told Hollywood Life in 2018. ‘She’s always the type of girl who will get up on top of the tables to start doing Shakespearean monologues so that she can get people to look her way and get people’s attention. She doesn’t know who she is yet.’

After Everything Sucks! came the call for HBO’s psychological-thriller, Sharp Objects, in which she played Amy Adams’ character’s teenage roommate at a psychiatric hospital, and then the martyred child bride Eden Blaine in season two of Margret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

‘I was filming the shows at the same time,’ Sydney continued. ‘During the week, I’d be filming Everything Sucks! and then I’d take a red-eye to either LA or Atlanta and would go finish up filming for Sharp Objects. It was night and day since my characters were so completely different.’

The world was starting to get word of Sweeney and her natural acting talents, and they wanted more of it. It’d be remiss not to mention that in 2018 Hollywood (ironically) came calling with the character of Diane ‘Snake’ Lake, one of Charles Manson’s groupies at Spahn Ranch, in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

‘It was so much fun,’ Sweeney told Build Series in 2019 while working on the Tarantino film. ‘Ya know when you have that bucket-list of all the people you wish to one day work with and then you just cross them all off on the exact same day. It was a surreal experience. I learnt so much.’

In the same interview, she was asked if she’d attended the infamous premiere at the Cannes Film Festival where Tarantino and the main cast received a seven minute (slightly awkward) standing ovation.

‘I was filming Euphoria,’ she replied to the interviewer. ‘I really wanted to be there but I was still filming.’

Ah yes, Euphoria! If you haven’t seen Euphoria, what rock have you been living under? Starring the likes of Zendaya, Maud Apatow and Jacob Elordi, to name a few, the first season was the second-most watched HBO series of all time (sitting closely behind Game of Thrones, until it was dethroned by House of the Dragon), and the second series had earth-shattering viewer numbers too.

Euphoria follows high schoolers in the fictional town of East Highland, California, who seek hope while balancing the strains of love, loss, sex, and addiction.

Though Sydney was very much a working actor at that stage, Euphoria made her a household name. It’s interesting to note that she initially turned down the role of Cassie at the beginning, however, as it contained nudity, which she wasn’t comfortable with. Reportedly, Sydney has always had issues with her body. It was in stepping out of her comfort zone whilst playing Cassie that she became empowered in herself, not letting any of the haters win on how they perceived her body. In turn, Sydney playing the role of Cassie in Euphoria allowed her to shine a light on body positivity and feminism in the industry. She very strongly maintains the view on embracing her body and feeling empowered in her skin, challenging the narrative around objectification, adding a layer of depth to her public persona.

‘Cassie truly is a dream to play,’ Sydney told Josh Horowitz on Apple’s Happy, Sad, Confused podcast, ‘and as an actor I’m so fortunate that I’ve had a character like her at such a young age. Of course, I wanna keep living her crazy. I love it!’

Sydney’s character, Cassie Howard had so much to unpack for her to sink her teeth into. Howard is portrayed as a beautiful bombshell from a broken home. In the first season, Sweeney portrays her as this sweet and nice girl who constantly makes wrong decisions. In the second season, all-hell-breaks-loose and the character really goes into a downward spiral. The scene in the spa—if you know you know.

If you haven’t seen this cultural phenomenon, you must watch it! Sweeney’s performance earned her critical acclaim and a 2022 Primetime Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, plus more accolades which are far too long to list.

‘[In Euphoria] we’re playing characters that mean so much to people,’ Sweeney said on Happy, Sad, Confused. ‘It’s the longest production I’ve worked on. Each season takes eight-to-10 months to film. So I’ve been able to build relationships with people and have almost like a family. Like Maud [Apatow] is my best friend, she’s like my actual sister. I feel so lucky to have something like that in this industry.’

Alongside her rise-to-fame in Euphoria, Sydney also played to her strengths and took as step into the unknown by co-founding her own production company, Fifty-Fifty Films, alongside Canadian Jean-Marc Vallée and Nathan Ross’ Crazyrose and Endeavor Content. The other founder is her now fiancee, Jonathan Davino.

The premise of the production company is to allow equal opportunities in fields traditionally less accessible to many. Whether the writers are female, male, non-binary, from a different background, or are of a certain age, Sweeney emphasises that their voices deserve to be heard.

‘Being able to make a dream of theirs that they didn’t think was possible for years and years happen, is amazing,’ Sweeney said to Grazia. ‘To never put a limit to what their capabilities are because they’re female, or their age, or their background. I’m a big advocate for making sure everybody’s voice is heard.’

In 2021, another big part crossed her desk. Coming off the back of Euphoria, everyone wanted a slice of Sweeney. It was a part written by American writer, producer and actor Mike White. The HBO series, The White Lotus, fit Sydney’s acting style to a T and really allowed her to show off her acting chops.

The first season of The White Lotus, in which Sydney played Olivia Mossbacher, was set at an exclusive Hawaiian resort, and explored the numerous goings-on of the guests. Sydney’s character is that of a fiery, spoiled college student, brimming with teenage angst who is on holiday with her family. Olivia’s mother, Nicole (played by Connie Britton) is the CFO of a search engine company, and her father, Mark (played by Steve Zahn) has a mysterious illness. Hilarious calamity at its finest.

In finding her character, Sydney said to Mara Webster of In Creative Company, that she needed to find the balance between caring and not caring. Sweeney listened to hundreds of podcasts that Mike White recommended to her to find the ‘funny in the natural’. She also found her character of Olivia through just hanging out with the others on set. Her natural kindness went a long way here (most probably learnt, in turn) from her time on Euphoria where she really made a family of actors. She’s been quoted as saying that she thinks that Jennifer Coolidge is one of the funniest people alive, purely from spending so much time with her onset and getting to bond with the other actors. I mean, Jennifer Cooledge does seem ridiculously funny.

‘I think we got to build a more comfortable environment,’ she said to Mara. ‘I think, as an actor, you feel safer exploring different avenues as your art. Being at a very safe camp is a great feeling.’

Being so comfortable and confident in her art then allowed her to explore the character more deeply. She was awarded a nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for that role.

It’s crazy to think that even before the age of 30, Sydney had really made a name for herself as an actor being part of two of the biggest shows in HBO history.

In an interview with Variety last year, she said to Kinley Franklin that between The White Lotus and Euphoria, she definitely has a favourite.

‘Olivia is a fun, snarky character,’ Sweeney said. ‘But Cassie challenges me in so many different ways because she is such a character. As an actor, that’s so much fun to play because you go to these places you may never have gone to before.’

So as Sydney’s name is becoming the biggest in Hollywood (on both TV and cinema screens), her resume continues to get busier and busier with more and more amazing projects. Yes she’s an amazing actor who can lighten up the screen with her talent and acting range, but she’s also a genuinely giving, good-hearted human.

‘I recently paid off my mum’s mortgage,’ the star revealed to WhoWhatWear earlier this year, adding how taking care of her parents ‘was a really big thing for [her] to be able to do.’ She also brought back her great-grandmother’s house from developers for her grandmother. Cute!

During the Christmas period of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sydney even donated $48,000 to local restaurants in her Sponake hometown and meals to feed the homeless. ‘I hope I’m able to provide a little holiday relief for both the restaurants, who are really struggling right now, and the homeless, who will be facing a really, really tough winter,’ Sweeney said. ‘And even if it’s just a little, I hope that others can find their own way to give back, too.’

Coming hot off the back of The White Lotus, Sweeney’s work-load continued to grow. She was placed on Time’s Next 100 list, became a beauty ambassador for both Armani Beauty and Lineage, starred in music videos for The Rolling Stones, was selected for Forbes lists and starred in three blockbuster hits, Anyone But You and Immaculate, both produced by her own Fifty-Fifty Film, and Madame Web alongside Dakotoa Johnson.

Immaculate, especially, allowed Sweeney’s ability to easily get into the skin of complex characters and deliver fabulously. She had actually auditioned for the film in 2014, but bought the rights and produced it through her own company to enforce some serious girl-power.

Sweeney is now shifting gears a bit more, set to star in the future as American professional boxer, Chrissy Martin. The biopic film, directed by David Michôd, will tell of the true story of Martin’s rise to become America’s most well known female boxer in the 1990’s.

And who knows…maybe a visit back to The White Lotus or Euphoria Season Three?

Looking at the journey this young, intelligent woman has made over her vast career, one thing is for certain: she’s got what it takes to do anything. What next? I can hear you asking. ‘I’ve always wanted to do a period piece,’ she said to S magazine. ‘I love character pieces that people don’t see me as. I’m just looking for things in which I can kind of be unrecognizable.’
Given the impact Sydney Sweeney has already made in Hollywood, being the full package, she’ll be impossible to miss.