KATHERINE STOEFFEL: We’re sort of talking around this American Eagle ad right now, and maybe we should just talk about it. Were you surprised by the reaction?
SYDNEY SWEENEY: I did a jean ad. I mean, the reaction definitely was a surprise, but I love jeans. All I wear are jeans. I’m literally in jeans and a T-shirt every day of my life.
KATHERINE STOEFFEL: The president and the vice president spoke about the jeans ad. What was that like?
SYDNEY SWEENEY: It was surreal.
KATHERINE STOEFFEL: I think it would be totally human to feel—I would probably feel—thankful that somebody had my back in public, and conveniently some very powerful people. I wondered if you felt that way.
SYDNEY SWEENEY: I don’t think…. It’s not that I didn’t have that feeling, but I wasn’t thinking of it like that, of any of it. I kind of just put my phone away. I was filming every day. I’m filming Euphoria, so I’m working 16-hour days and I don’t really bring my phone on set, so I work and then I go home and I go to sleep. So I didn’t really see a lot of it.
KATHERINE STOEFFEL: You’ve made a really good case for keeping your thoughts and your life separate from that work. The risk is that there’s a chance that somebody will get some idea about what you think about certain issues and feel like, Oh, I don’t want to see Christy because of that. Do you worry about that?
SYDNEY SWEENEY: No. No, I think that if somebody is closed off because of something they read online to a powerful story like Christy, then I hope that something else can open their eyes to being open to art and being open to learning, and I’m not going to be affected by that.
KATHERINE STOEFFEL: Is there something that you want to say about the ad itself? The criticism of the content was basically that, maybe specifically in this political climate, white people shouldn’t joke about genetic superiority.
SYDNEY SWEENEY: I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.
KATHERINE STOEFFEL: By some reports, American Eagle’s stock price went up 38 percent. Does that make it less painful to be at the center of that much conversation, if you know that it really worked for the business that you’re partnering with?
SYDNEY SWEENEY: I was aware of the numbers as it was going. So when I saw all the headlines of in-store visits were down a certain percentage, none of it was true. It was all made up, but nobody could say anything because [the company was] in their quiet period. So it was all just a lot of talk. And because I knew at the end of the day what that ad was for, and it was great jeans, it didn’t affect me one way or the other.
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