Every time Sydney Sweeney pops up—which has been a lot recently—Lainey and I have some variation of the same conversation, debating her merits as an actor. Lainey maintains Sydney doesn’t make much of an impact, she’s in good stuff, like Euphoria and White Lotus (and The Voyeurs, which got less coverage than those shows but is good), but she’s never the most memorable person on screen. I maintain that’s because right now, everything is about her boobs.
Sydney Sweeney could be the best actress of her generation and we wouldn’t know it because her boobs get top billing everywhere she goes. I get it! They’re great boobs.
Sweeney is in the position Scarlett Johansson was in twenty years ago. No one can focus on anything except her body, no matter how good her work is. It took a long time and concentrated effort on ScarJo’s part to alter that narrative even a little bit—it’s never really gone away, but over time, her body took a backseat to her body of work.
This is probably why Sweeney has kept her head down since wrapping her rom-com in Australia with Glen Powell, maybe even why she hasn’t rushed straight into a breakup of her own. Glen Powell can be a f-ckboy all he wants, and it won’t really stick, professionally, but the deck is stacked against Sweeney—young, blonde, stacked—if she’s absorbed into public consciousness as some kind of femme fatale. As it stands, the heat on her whatever-ship with Powell is fading, and she seems to be escaping that moment without carrying too much negative baggage with her.
And she’ll have a chance later this month to redirect the conversation even further, and maybe finally prove her acting chops beyond a shadow of a doubt, with the HBO original film, Reality. The trailer dropped yesterday, and it is GOOD, tense and fraught and Sweeney looks believable as NSA whistleblower Reality Winner. It is also, notably, Not About Her Boobs. This is the kind of character-driven work Sweeney needs to show us what she has to offer beyond The Body, and it could be a major point of separation between her persona as The Body and a future as a major actor.
Reality comes from playwright and theater director Tina Satter, making her cinematic debut. In 2019, Satter directed the Off Broadway show IS THIS A ROOM: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription, which is, as advertised, a verbatim performance of Winner’s 2017 interrogation by after classified documents about Russian interference in the 2016 US election were leaked to Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept. The show got rave reviews, and Satter then co-wrote Reality, a docu-drama, with James Paul Dallas for the screen.
Every generation has A Body, going all the way back to beginning of cinema and stars like Clara Bow and Jean Harlow. Sydney Sweeney is just the latest. But they all need that one role that breaks them out of the trap of being famous for being beautiful, and Reality might just be Sydney Sweeney’s ticket out of that trap.
