Will it affect Sydney Sweeney and her career to be known as a Republican?

Dear Gossips,

Lainey and I have been in disagreement over Sydney Sweeney since she emerged as an It Girl a couple years ago. Lainey has never seen it, I have always defended her as a good actress, most notably in dramas (Euphoria and Reality are where I always point). Lainey got the last laugh, though, as the “Sydney Sweeney good jeans” controversy reached “Sydney Sweeney is a confirmed Republican” pitch over the weekend.

To recap, American Eagle dropped a denim ad campaign featuring Sweeney, the tagline “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”, and a commercial in which Sweeney monotones: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” It’s a pun, her eyes are blue, she’s wearing blue jeans, so she has blue genes and blue jeans. It’s also weirdly white supremacist, and it’s impossible to imagine that in this day and age of bitterly divisive culture war politics that it didn’t occur to at least one person how this ad campaign might be received.

Sydney Sweeney was already the site of a weird culture war in which conservatives insist that woke scolds are against Sydney Sweeney because she’s a hot blonde with big boobs. That is just not true, people of all stripes like hot blondes with big boobs, but Sweeney has been the subject of online side-eye for activities like throwing a MAGA-themed birthday party for her mother, which she called a “misinterpretation” of the event. More recently, she voluntarily moved to Florida.

(Sidebar: I firmly believe there should be some kind of tax claw back when people start making real money and immediately move to Texas or Florida, states without individual income tax. For instance, Joe Rogan built his podcast empire in Los Angeles, a city that uniquely offered him enormous access to celebrities to appear on his show. But the minute he got his original Spotify deal, he moved to Texas. He said it was about masking during COVID, but it wasn’t. It was about that $100 million and not paying California taxes on it, even though California and its celebrity ecosystem is what put him in a position to make that money in the first place. Ditto for Tom Segura, and Sydney Sweeney hightailing it to Florida once the real money started rolling in.)

People have always speculated Sydney Sweeney is a not-so-secret Republican, but now it is official. Following her move to Florida, she registered to vote there in 2024 as a Republican, as confirmed by publicly available records.

The accepted narrative has always been that Hollywood hates conservatives and to be a known conservative is to suffer in your career, except that is not and has never been true. Hollywood is filled with progressives and leftists, sure, but they’re the lowly gig workers, union members, and artsy dreamers who, for the most part, create and make the product the industry sells. The people in charge are mostly conservative. Also, Hollywood has bent to conservative ideals more than once in its history, most notably during the mid-20th century (Hayes Code), the 1950s (McCarthysim/blacklisting), and right f-cking now.

So, will it affect Sydney Sweeney to be known as a Republican? No. No more than it affected Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Downey, Jr., Chris Pratt, or anyone else. Pratt is the nearest analog to Sweeney, they’re both even from Washington state. Like Pratt, Sweeney might find she is now less popular online, but in the real world, her career will continue unabated. She will remain booked and busy, keep making money from a cavalcade of un-curated brand deals, and everyone will still be f-cking weird about her huge boobs. Nothing material will change.

…Unless things get so bad that MAGA becomes completely toxic, like McCarthyism eventually did. Many prominent Hollywood figures of that era, including gossip maven Louella Parsons and director Elia Kazan, ended up with asterisks next to their names. Kazan named names in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, which cost him his friendship with Arthur Miller, and the distrust and dislike of many of his peers (Orson Welles flat out called him a “traitor”). When Kazan received an honorary Oscar in 1999, there was a visible division in the crowd. Some, like Warren Beatty, stood and applauded, others applauded but remained seated (Steven Spielberg), and still others flatly refused to honor Kazan (absolute legends Ed Harris and Amy Madigan).

There’s a chance that celebrities associated with conservatism at this point in time, which however much you try to split hairs, HAS become inextricably entwined with the MAGA movement, end up with an asterisk next to their name, but IF that happens, it will be years down the line. In the meantime, Sydney Sweeney is fine, she will continue to be fine, all this controversy only helps to expand her face/boobs/name recognition, just in time for her inevitable Oscar campaign for the Christy Martin biopic later this year. Let’s see how much this storyline resonates then.

Here is Sweeney over the weekend at the premiere of her latest film, Americana, wearing an ugly dress and incredibly hideous shoes. Seriously, zoom in on the shoes. HIDEOUS.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah