Why everyone is still so obsessed with Sydney Sweeney

When regular people talk about a celebrity having “literally the worst week ever,” it’s never actually the worst week a person could ever have. What they mean is that a famous person is dealing with famous-people problems that regular people never deal with, combined with attention that civilians will never endure.

That in mind: For a celebrity, Sydney Sweeney is having literally the worst week ever.

Sweeney, the star of HBO’s Euphoria and The White Lotus and the big screen rom-com Anyone But You, bombed at the box office; her new movie Christy, a middling biopic about boxer Christy Martin, barely made $1 million in its opening weekend. That’s awful. For some perspective, the 2020 re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas (a movie that was about as old as Sydney Sweeney at the time) made $1.3 million when Disney brought it back to theaters — about the same money that Sweeney’s movie made.

Rubbing salt in the wound, on social media a journalist posted a query they received from Sweeney and the movie’s PR team, urging them to change the narrative of a box office bomb because the movie has a high “popcornmeter rating” (an audience feature on Rotten Tomatoes).

Sweeney’s box office bust coincided with an evasive GQ interview about her infamous American Eagle jeans ad from earlier this year. The ad featured wordplay, smirking at the idea that Sweeney has good genes while also possessing good jeans. Sweeney’s ad and the backlash it spurred got so much attention that President Donald Trump weighed in, praising the ad and Sweeney. Asked if she understood the optics of a white person with blonde hair and blue eyes implying genetic superiority, Sweeney gave a non-answer: “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”

Celebrities and concerned members of the public have been calling out Sweeney’s interview for its lack of clarity and its implications, mainly that Sweeney seems to be winking and nodding at, if not cosigning, racist ideas and white supremacy.

On top of this, there are reports this week that Zendaya, arguably the most famous celebrity in Sweeney’s proximity, is refusing to do press with Sweeney to promote their show Euphoria because of Sweeney’s politics.

Together, it’s all being billed as the worst seven days in Sydney Sweeney’s existence. But it’s hard to really believe this is the worst week of Sydney Sweeney’s life — mainly because we’re still talking about her. It’d be worse for Sweeney, or any famous person, to fade away into obscurity.

That’s easier said than done, because Sydney Sweeney, and the team behind Sydney Sweeney, has put in so much work to make sure that never happens. It’s perhaps her most valuable skill as an actress, maybe even more valuable than her acting.

For so many celebrities today, media attention is currency. For a lot of them, attention can be more valuable than a good TV show or a well-regarded indie movie. There are even actors and actresses whose acting careers feel a bit like loss leaders, in the sense that their personal brands are more lucrative and successful than any acting project they could be in. Sweeney is no exception.

Sweeney herself told the Hollywood Reporter in 2022 that to court a generation raised on the internet, she needed to think about exposure beyond TV and movies. “If I just acted, I wouldn’t be able to afford my life in LA. I take deals because I have to.”

Jessica Goodman, a novelist whose book is in the process of being adapted into an HBO series starring Sweeney, told THR: “When we met, it was immediately obvious to me that Sydney was very savvy, that she was very self-aware about the way she is viewed in the world and that she wanted to take charge of her own career.”

Sydney Sweeney’s celebrity persona is more fascinating than Sydney Sweeney’s acting

Sweeney’s ability to parlay public interest in Sydney Sweeney into interest in her projects has often worked out for her.

Back in 2023, during the production and promotion of Anyone But You, she and co-star Glen Powell created an are-they-or-aren’t-they showmance through social media, public appearances together, and photographs from the set. Both were dating other people at the time; Sweeney was engaged to her then-fiancé Jonathan Davino. Neither would confirm if they were dating, an ambiguity that only threw gasoline on the fire and helped make the movie a box office success.

Sydney Sweeney at Jeff Bezos’s and Lauren Sanchez’s wedding. | Luigi Iorio/GC Images

In the context of Sweeney’s business moves and how she manages her self-image, her American Eagle jeans ad certainly feels like another extracurricular aimed at keeping our attention. It doesn’t seem to matter if that attention is scandalous, if not caustic. That ad followed a stunt this summer in which Sweeney collaborated with men’s grooming brand Dr. Squatch to sell a bar of soap “infused” with Sweeney’s bathwater. Sweeney’s bathwater soap debuted to a chorus of horny awooga awoogas among the various straight guy pockets of the internet, along with eye-rolls and various iterations of “gross” elsewhere. Sweeney later blamed women for the backlash to her selling her bathwater soap to men.

Everyone wants to know about Sydney Sweeney’s politics

Given how much attention is paid to culture wars, it’s not totally unexpected that Sweeney has now created an is-she-or-isn’t-she narrative surrounding her politics. The parties she attends and whom she’s photographed with all feel like Easter eggs. Sweeney has provided more than enough evidence (she is reportedly a registered Republican and attended a MAGA-themed birthday party for one of her relatives in 2023) about where she stands. Yet it’s a testament to how Sweeney has gamed everyone’s interest that every interview, including this past week’s viral GQ one, aims to clarify Sweeney’s politics.

That question mark keeps her relevant in a way that actors who are openly conservative are not. Those actors and actresses (see: Zachary Levi, Gina Carano, etc.) polarize audiences and tend to be seen by studios as liabilities. (For example, Levi recently implied that Broadway star Gavin Creel — who died in September at 48 from an aggressive form of cancer — died from the Covid-19 vaccine). By contrast, Sweeney’s semi-plausible deniability keeps that window of opportunity cracked open.

She’d also be disproportionately less captivating, much less so than some of her peers, if she were a staunch Democrat. If Sweeney were a Democrat in an industry full of Democrats, her celebrity image wouldn’t be as intriguing or as edgy as it is now. There would be no viral interviews and no public guessing game about whom and what she supports.   

The most pertinent question about Sydney Sweeney isn’t what her definitive politics are, or why she’s selling bathwater, or how she’s in movies that no one watches. Rather, it’s why so many people care so much about Sydney Sweeney’s politics, bathwater, or her success. They do, so all of it — even her worst week ever — feels like it’s part of the design.