Sydney Sweeney was looking all business yesterday, Monday, in New York City. She’s in NYC because she is hosting Saturday Night Live this weekend with musical guest Kacey Musgraves. Perhaps she was heading to or from the Monday meeting?
SNL has functioned pretty much in the same for over four decades. Mondays are for pitching – this is when Lorne Michaels and the whole SNL team, writers, performers, and the host, get together to pitch ideas to the host. Sometimes the host pitches too. By the end of the meeting, usually two to three hours, something like 40 ideas are heard and the next day is spent writing.
It’s not surprising that Sydney was invited to host. This would have been booked ahead of the release of Madame Web and even though the movie is a bust, it’s still in theatres and an appearance on SNL works as a promotional opportunity. Like Madame Web, Anyone But You was a critical flop. Unlike Madame Web, though, Anyone But You is a certified box office smash. Last I checked the movie was at something like $250 million worldwide, against a $25 million budget. And Sydney produced it – so SNL can also be seen as something of a victory lap for her.
That’s also why she and Glen Powell are looking to make another one, just as Maria wrote in Celebrity Social Media yesterday, they have the potential to be their generation’s Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey who are MY generation’s rom-com partnership.
And I stress the generations here because, well, Anyone But You did not do it for me, not because of Glen but because of Sydney. Rom-coms, typically, are formulaic, down to the personality of the heroine. She’s spunky, irreverent, bubbly, frantic, sometimes clumsy, often self-righteous, and of course funny. Sydney’s character tried to be all these things but Sydney the actress… I didn’t feel it. All I wanted to do was shout at the screen and tell her to open her mouth when she talks. And maybe do one line delivery, PLEASE, like she was awake.
But. That’s how the under-30 white girls of the English-speaking world talk these days. They have eliminated the exclamation point from speech. Even when they try to say something with an exclamation point at the end, it comes out like a glorified comma, never a period, because these kids these days, they don’t ever end a sentence, lol. Every uttered statement concludes with an ellipsis. This verbal punctuation chaos was basically how Sydney Sweeney spoke through Anyone But You. And, I guess, that’s what people of her generation responded to because they kept going to see the movie.
How does that translate to live sketch comedy though? Dakota Johnson’s manner of speaking isn’t unlike Sydney’s and, well, many of her SNL sketches were flat. The live ones, that is. Did you notice that Dakota’s strongest sketches on SNL were the pre-taped ones? She was hilarious in all of the pre-taped pieces because her natural humour is just better served in an edit. Live television requires a certain energy that’s not quite suited to Dakota’s low blood pressure vibe.
To go back to Sydney, I’m curious to see where she lands on vibe, because she’s closer to Dakota on the energy level and it’ll be interesting to see how it plays for her. It doesn’t aways have to go the way Dakota’s did. Kristen Stewart, for example, isn’t exactly a top hat and jazz hands kind of person but she was able to draw outside of those lines with the material she was given. Will Sydney be more Dakota or will it be more KStew?
