Sydney Sweeney’s turn from hot girl to hot dog may be just what the world needs.
By Joshua Tyler
| Updated
The edgy, ultra-graphic HBO series Euphoria returned for its third season this week. Its second season aired in 2022, and it was a totally different world. Back then, Sydney Sweeney was just another member of the Euphoria ensemble, not a brand unto herself, on her way to becoming one of the most famous women in the world.
In its previous two seasons, Euphoria seemed to take particular delight in putting Sydney Sweeney’s character, Cassie Howard, in compromising, often unclothed situations. Season 3’s first episode took things to an entirely new level, though. The show put her in a corset, attached a leash, put on dog ears, and then made her eat out of a dog bowl.
The sequence, which is a pretty big chunk of the episode, was odd even by Euphoria’s standards. It’s even weirder when you consider Sydney Sweeney’s current level of fame and the fact that she no longer has any real need to do things like this for a paycheck. But it may also be important because it symbolizes a broader cultural movement in Hollywood. One that may be good for anyone who’s sick of increasingly terrible entertainment products.
The Early Formation Of A Cultural Shift
What a trend will become isn’t always clear in its earliest days. No one knew what Gamergate would become when it started. We only knew that something big was happening and that it was taking us somewhere unusual.
The same is happening with Sydney Sweeney, who was one of the earliest modern stars to buck the post-COVID cultural demand that starlets de-emphasize their beauty and femininity. She broke that newly formed taboo when she wore a Hooters t-shirt and jumped up and down on a Saturday Night Live episode in 2024.
Since then, Sydney Sweeney has accelerated her total embrace of being that super-attractive girl. She seems intent on positioning herself as the new Marilyn Monroe. She did those infamous jeans ads, her very R-rated erotic thriller The Housemaid was a huge hit, and now she’s even pushing a lingerie line sold purely on the aesthetic value of her curves.
Sweeney’s not the only one, of course; other modern female stars have now followed suit and joined the shift away from shaming men for thinking they’re attractive. Margaret Qualley seems all in, for instance, and her embrace of being attractive helped make The Substance a big critical and commercial hit. But it’s Sweeney on the cutting edge of whatever this growing trend is.
So when she shows up on a television show in a dog collar and spends most of her screen time eating out of a dog bowl, it’s worth noticing that something weird is going on here.
What It Means When Sydney Sweeney Puts Herself On A Leash
Euphoria debuted its first season way back in 2019. In those pre-COVID years, Sweeney wasn’t very famous yet. At the time, her willingness to flaunt her skin on the series was, in no small part, responsible for setting a path towards big-time fame. That’s all fine, but normally it’s also the kind of dog and pony show a big star would abandon once they became a big star.
Sydney’s not the only star on Eurphoria, of course; Zendaya is in it too, which suggests that there’s something about the series level of quality or artistic merit that has them sticking around when they could be on to bigger and better things. But Euphoria doesn’t expect Zendaya to eat out of a dog bowl or pant seductively into the camera. If it did, I suspect she’d have abandoned the show to focus on whatever latest Spider-Man movie she’s making money off of.
Contract or not, actresses have often bailed on shows with lesser expectations than these. The penalty for breaking a contract is not as severe as the one for ruining your public image, at least not for most celebrities.
But that’s also why people seem to like Sydney Sweeney. She doesn’t care about what people think her public image should be; she seems only to care about what her fans want to see from her. She’s the antithesis of everything else Hollywood is doing, which is making entertainment for themselves rather than their audience.
Audience First Entertainment Is Making A Comeback, And Sydney Sweeney Is Leading The Charge
Sydney Sweeney mounting a dog house and sporting a cold, wet nose above her shamelessly displayed cleavage is so strange that audiences are sure to want to watch it. And aside from that unfortunate movie where she played an intentionally unappealing boxer, Sweeney seems focused on doing what she thinks her audience, especially her male audience, might have fun watching.
Sydney Sweeney’s turn from hot girl to hot dog may be the ultimate representation of what this new, slow Hollywood trend toward audience-first entertainment is really all about. And what it’s about is giving the audience what they actually want, politics and pressure from outside forces be damned.
In a world where Hollywood has stopped making things for its audience in favor of making things to please itself, a little dose of Sydney Sweeney wagging her tail may be exactly what the failing world of entertainment needs. Lap it up? I guess?
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