Sydney Sweeney is the sweetest! How sweet is Sydney Sweeney? So sweet that even her name sounds like a Sherbet Dip-Dab swirled in sugar and sheathed in sparkly cellophane, or an IV drip of blended rainbows that shoots glitter through your blood plasma. Two double-Sydney Sweeneys, extra sprinkles! So sweet that when Sydney Sweeney tells you you can do something – and she has every faith that you can – you will instantly forget why you ever doubted yourself in the first place. A compliment from Sweeney – for instance, while you’re both hanging out at a pottery painting studio on a sunny afternoon – is like having a pep talk from Oprah, or The Rock spot you at the gym: “I believe in you!” “Don’t be scared!” “In art there are no mistakes!”

Sydney Sweeney, who is painting a serving platter with the laser focus that her Euphoria character, Cassie, brings to her 4am skincare routine, is actually more of a blue kind of girl (“my favourite colour”) but today has fallen in love with cornflower yellow number 49 (“I love how yellow pops!’). The truth is that Sweeney really wishes she’d chosen to paint the decorative Christmas platter. Sydney Sweeney truly, madly, deeply loves Christmas. She loves Christmas in the get-the-Christmas-napkins-out, watch-the-Hallmark-Channel-for-28-days-straight, pipe-white-icing-into-my-veins kind of way. She badly wants to make a Christmas movie. The way she has been online looking at Christmas decorations for months, she says in a sing-song voice, “is a sickness!” And that might just be the most Sydney Sweeney thing anyone has ever said.

Speaking of “holidays”, it is “fall”, and I am sitting with Sweeney inside a pottery café in a town south-west of Boston, where Sweeney has been shooting Sony’s Spider-Man spin-off, Madame Web, since June. And we are in the airless basement of the building because the Boston University swimming team upstairs have twigged that the star of the most tweeted-about TV show of the decade shares their enthusiasm for painting ceramics.

Sweeney had greeted me on the street with a full-body hug. Dressed in jeans, trainers and a jumper, and with minimal make-up, the 25-year-old almost went unnoticed in the Saturday afternoon throng of teenage girls brandishing palettes and sponges. But then someone noticed that one of the stars of Euphoria was standing just three feet away, deliberating between painting a vase or an egg cup. Judging by the looks on their faces (which made Edvard Munch’s The Scream look like it has the emotive range of The Mona Lisa) they may soon bust the door open. But for now all is calm, apart from the interruptions of the extremely polite proprietor, Doug, who has come in to warn us that news of Sweeney’s presence is spreading. “Blogging has started,” Doug says, in the doleful tone of a Silicon Valley whistleblower. “It’s the world we live in, is it not?”

The hysterics upstairs are normal for Sweeney. Ever since Sweeney broke through – with roles in the likes of The Handmaid’s Tale and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, followed by this year’s double-Emmy nominations for Euphoria and The White Lotus – things have been a little wild. Ceramics have become Sweeney’s rabbit hole away from all the noise. Her recent pottery highlights, she explains, include a cookie plate and a flowery bowl for her Lab-German Shepherd mix, Tank. “I love to create a world, even if it’s just for my dog,” she says

While Sweeney talks she is studiously referencing an Instagram post of several bowls adorned with tiny oranges and frills of flowers threaded together with green vines. I, meanwhile, am sponging my own platter in number 17 lifeless beige with the haphazard clumsiness of the plaster mask scene in Mrs. Doubtfire. “That looks so cool!” Sweeney says, sweetly. “It does!” (It does not.)

Pottery painting is only one entry in Sweeney’s long and unexpected list of talents. She restores vintage cars. She is trained in mixed martial arts. She has her own production company, Fifty-Fifty Films. At high school she spent her time juggling an exhausting number of sports – including golf, softball, football, skiing, and dirt biking – with the robotics team and an academic club called, genuinely, Math Is Cool. It almost goes without saying that Sydney Sweeney was also class valedictorian.

If you are surprised by any of this, then you are not the first. Even back then people thought they had Sydney Sweeney sussed from her conspiratorial giggle and shimmer of Cinderella hair. Perhaps they missed the ember of a wakeboard accident scar glowing beneath her left eye (you should see the wakeboard!), or the faded shadows of old wrestling bruises on her legs. Because the truth is that, while Sydney Sweeney is the sweetest! She could also probably crush you.
If you’re unsure whether you’re too old for Euphoria, a good litmus test is how tired you feel while watching opioid-curious, body-dysmorphic, parent-begrudging teenagers career around while not making a single good decision during the one-hour episode span. Resigned to revenge porn and unconcerned by their Screen Time reports, the youth on Euphoria negotiate our sympathy as we’re guided through their darkest moments and memories. It’s a reminder of how teetering between being a child and adulthood can be both crushing and invigorating; a depressant and a stimulant in one heady hit.

After spending the first season of Euphoria architecting the beautiful and meek proto-cheerleader Cassie Howard, Sweeney relished her abrupt downturn in season two. “I love the spiral that Cassie goes down,” she says, with a villainous smile. “[The darker material] is the easiest for me. I can access my emotions easily, so that’s just kind of what happens.” Sweeney can see why Cassie might have been pushed so hard by the stacked odds of being a young woman that unravelling felt like freedom. Judging by the many screenshots of Cassie in increasingly deranged situations that were spun into internet gold, she wasn’t the only one who could relate.

Sweeney has seen the memes: Cassie cowering in the bath while her best friend, whose boyfriend she just finished having sex with, hammers on the door. Her puking in the hot tub. Her dancing to Sinéad O’Connor while drunkenly tangled in balloons (which, incidentally, she’s dying for director Sam Levinson to release the uncut footage of). That bathroom scene where she screamed at her friends that she has NEVER! EVER! BEEN! HAPPIER!

Sweeney was already defending her title as Twitter’s most screenshotted HBO property after last summer’s The White Lotus. Sweeney’s character, the sardonic, Nietzsche-reading tyrant Olivia, dragged on holiday to Hawaii by her excruciatingly boomer parents, sent a collective shiver down the internet’s spine. The devastating side-eye deployed by Olivia and her best friend Paula to any hotel guest who crossed their poolside path quickly became shorthand for how utterly out of touch Gen Z think you are. The New York Times crowned them “the scariest girls on TV.” But, as with so many of Sweeney’s roles, The White Lotus slowly peeled back Olivia’s anti-racist, intersectional allyship as a false façade, leaving something darker underneath.

Sweeney is a director’s gift when it comes to fucking with the audience. As both Cassie and Olivia, she plays to the cliché of who you would expect those girls to be, then pulls the rug at the moment you think you have them pinned down. I ask Sweeney whether picking these bait-and-switch characters are because she feels misunderstood and finds herself performing that gotcha moment herself. “I like finding characters who challenge the viewer,” Sweeney says. “I dyed my hair blonde and started dressing up for photoshoots and people thought that is who I am. I worked really hard to change that perception of myself, especially in high school.”

Sydney Sweeney grew up 20 miles from the Washington-Idaho border. She has few memories of ever being inside growing up, instead spending her childhood in the sprawling woodlands around Spokane, hiking through forests and swimming in open water. It was a happy, all-American origin story, although the music changed when she had to come inside and line up with all the other girls.

As a teenager, Sweeney suffered from acne so bad that she once took the drastic action of covering her face with toothpaste as a last resort and came out in horrific rashes for days. Her body would wage silent wars with her in other, more complicated ways too. “I had boobs before other girls and I felt ostracised for it,” Sweeney says. “I was embarrassed and I never wanted to change in the locker room. I think that I put on this weird persona other people had of me because of my body. So I did play every sport and I studied really hard and I did everything that people wouldn’t think I would do, to show them that my body doesn’t define who I am.”

When she was 11, a low-budget zombie movie came to shoot in her town. Sweeney begged her parents to let her audition. She convinced them, landing the role of Lisa in Zombies of Mass Destruction. After that she started auditioning for whatever she could. When she was 13, the family moved to Los Angeles, and for years Sweeney took roles in “not even the good indies” just to prove she was working. Unable to afford the rental prices in LA, her parents gave up their family home and eventually moved into a motel.

“I PLAYED EVERY SPORT AND I STUDIED REALLY HARD AND I DID EVERYTHING THAT PEOPLE WOULDN’T THINK I WOULD DO, TO SHOW THEM THAT MY BODY DOESN’T DEFINE WHO I AM.”
“I hated going home and friends or family members being like, ‘When are you going to come home and get a real job?’” Sweeney says. “There were a lot of really condescending statements that would make me disappointed in myself and guilty that my parents had given up so much to allow me to follow my dreams.”

Suddenly, in the way that things feel instantaneous after you’ve been crawling with no progress for so long, Sweeney booked both 2018’s Sharp Objects, and the Netflix show Everything Sucks!. From there, the roles have kept coming: a child bride on The Handmaid’s Tale, a doe-eyed Manson cultist in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Those roles are increasingly leading ones: Madame Web; Sony’s forthcoming reboot of Barbarella. As she has become more and more in demand, Sweeney has found herself keeping increasingly surreal celebrity company, from Drake, who produces Euphoria and comes to hang on set (“He is super-sweet and super-nice!”) to Jennifer Coolidge (“I’m obsessed with her!”)

Today, the people who had mockingly asked what they could see her in are the ones in her DMs congratulating her on award nominations. “I truly believe success is the best revenge,” she says, exhaling a breath that sounds like it had a long way to travel.

“All right!” Sweeney puts down the plate and smiles the sweetest smile at that lovely shade of yellow number 49. “Second coat down. Art is freedom of speech!”

With fame has come the realisation that, in public at least, it’s hard for Sweeney to be herself anymore. Recently Sweeney went out by herself to a flea market (“a terrible decision”) and was mobbed by people asking for selfies. After a while, Sweeney realised that she wasn’t enjoying herself anymore, but that she didn’t have a way out. She ‘escaped’ her way: by politely taking photographs with everyone until there was nobody left asking.

It’s not the first time she has found fame suffocating. This summer, while shooting a new film about the whistleblower Reality Winner, Sweeney had started to feel like she was drowning. “I put so much into that movie and every hour I had off I had a photoshoot or interview or prepping for Madame Web,” she says. “I wasn’t allowed to quiet my brain. And that’s hard.” The burnout led to panic attacks, and stretches where she couldn’t sleep. “I had seven days off. I went home and turned off my phone.” But it was all waiting for her when she turned her phone back on. “I was like, ‘Fuck, I can’t do that again,’ so I have to find a healthy in-between.”

Balancing work and rest is not something that Sweeney always finds easy. In July this year, she made headlines after giving an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, in which she spoke of taking sponsorship deals and not being able to take time out because, unlike many other young actors, she had no support group. The comments set off a debate online, where reactions were split between sympathy for working actors without rich parents, and pretty much, oh, being famous is such a chore, boohoo! I ask Sweeney if she resents ‘nepo babies’ – the internet’s favourite term for child actors who are able to walk into Hollywood on the back of their parents’ connections. “I might have had to work longer to get through the same door they were able to walk through,” she says. “But there’s nothing I can do. I never knew that existed until I got to this place and then I was like, ‘What the fuck was I doing for 10 years?!’”

Sweeney stands out in Hollywood in other ways. Spokane county, where she grew up, voted for Trump by clear margins in both 2016 and 2020, and her friends and family have seldom left that place. She was criticised after photographs of her mother’s 60th birthday party appeared on Instagram, showing guests wearing Trump baseball caps and T-shirts. “Honestly I feel like nothing I say can help the conversation,” she says. “It’s been turning into a wildfire and nothing I can say will take it back to the correct track.”

Telling the story means feeding a narrative Sweeney can’t control. She doesn’t mind being interviewed, but right now she’s wondering which 10 lines are going to make it into this piece and give people another version of her to contend with that isn’t quite right. Fame often seems like a spectator sport at which many are excited to see her fail. “I’ll see people say, ‘She needs to get media training’. Why, do you want to see a robot?” she says. “I don’t think there’s any winning.” Does she read the comments? “Sadly, yes.”

Sweeney’s parents eventually divorced. Sweeney’s father, who has remarried and lives on a ranch outside the US and without phone service, has never seen Euphoria, or much of what she’s done, as far as she knows. “When I go home my family doesn’t understand me or the world I’m in anymore,” she says, head down. “But then in this industry, my home and the place that grounds me is so vastly different to how people live there. I’m in this in-between place where I feel like neither side understands me.”

“I’LL SEE PEOPLE SAY, ‘SHE NEEDS TO GET MEDIA TRAINING’. WHY, DO YOU WANT TO SEE A ROBOT?”
Sometimes it feels as if Sweeney is looking over her shoulder, expecting someone to snatch everything back from her. Spending money still feels “so stressful”, she says, having seen her parents lose all of theirs. Similarly, the dark stories on Euphoria, which for affluent millennials in solid blue states might feel wildly exotic for their nosedive into poverty and trauma, are things she’s actually seen.

Her own time at school was spent never going to a single party because she “didn’t feel the need”, and obeying her parents’ unerring strictness about academic performance. But there is also, she says, a “really deep, deep streak of addiction” that runs through her family, one that she saw pull the people around her apart from the passenger seat of her childhood.

“I come from a family of Cassies and [recovering drug addict in the show] Rues,” she says. “Mostly Rues. I’ve never actually tried any drug, never drank, because I’ve seen my aunts, uncles, cousins, and the effect not just on that person but the community surrounding them. It’s hard to watch someone want to destroy themselves. It’s hard when people judge people they don’t know.”

Doug is back. He wants to thank Sweeney, because suddenly his pottery café is the hottest spot in the wider Boston metropolitan area and quite possibly the entire global ceramics scene. I am now adorning the beige platter with some unidentifiable family of fauna that, thanks to their yellow centre, Sweeney informs me, look like her adolescent acne. It might be the meanest thing Sydney Sweeney has ever said. “I think you’ve got this! Mine is just blobs right now so I don’t know what you’re worried about,” she smiles. “It can be our thing!”

Perhaps the most unlikely hobby on a long list of activities that Sweeney has made her thing is Syd’s Garage, her TikTok account, in which she records herself fixing up vintage cars. The first project was a 1969 Ford Bronco, which she bought at an auction and lovingly restored brake by brake, tyre by tyre. The account was just something that she started in order to share her progress with her mother, but ended up amassing 1.5 million followers in the process.

For Sweeney, working on the cars is another way to do something that soothes her frantic mind and keeps her hands busy on something that isn’t a screen. “It’s more like who I was growing up, with people doing things with their hands and getting dirty,” she says. “I love it.” See also her recently discovered love of MMA fighting and grappling, which she took up while living in Los Angeles, because travelling for work means she can no longer play team sports without letting everyone down. “The thing I loved the most was how much I was teaching my brain to not give up,” she says. “If my body thinks it’s tired then my brain can tell me it’s not. Discipline is one of the first things that they teach you, and I really liked the respect I was teaching myself. Now I put that into everything I do.”

Could she throw me to the floor?, I wonder aloud. “I mean, yes, but not right now,” she laughs, explaining with some sadness that she’s under strict instructions not to fight in case whoever she is playing on Madame Web (your guess is as good as mine) turns up on set covered in bruises. Has she ever actually punched anyone? “Oh yeah. It’s fighting.”

Women’s bodies and the theme of bodily autonomy crop up in Sweeney’s work repeatedly, most glaringly in the ending of Euphoria’s first season, when Cassie faces an abortion alone. “When I was doing The Handmaid’s Tale I had a lot of women come up to me and tell me how much the show meant to them,” she says of her role in the TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s once-dystopian novel. With the overturning of Roe vs. Wade, the series feels darker and more urgent than ever. “People were like, ‘Oh no that’ll never happen.’ I honestly don’t know how we’re in the place that we’re in.”

Sweeney has come of age at a moment where being an incredibly beautiful woman in the entertainment industry is like standing on a trap door. If she embraces her beauty and talks of sex scenes as empowering, then she’s trading on her sexuality and using feminism as a get-out-of-jail-free card. If she voices insecurities about her body, she’s ridiculed for being some Hot Lives Matter activist seeking empathy for the trials and tribulations of being ridiculously good-looking. I find it interesting that in our long and winding conversation Sweeney never conflates her own self-confidence and body image with a wider feminist movement. Perhaps she knows people are tired of everything being empowering, or perhaps she’s aware that people don’t think feminism is for a girl that looks like her. Really, in exposing her body she is trying to tell a story about the judgements we make of women.

“WHEN I WAS DOING THE HANDMAID’S TALE I HAD A LOT OF WOMEN COME UP TO ME AND TELL ME HOW MUCH THE SHOW MEANT TO THEM”
The venom she receives online in reaction to nude scenes proves the point. At one point in Euphoria’s first season, nude videos of Cassie are circulated around school. Since the episode aired, people have taken to screenshotting grainy stills of the footage and uploading them to Instagram. “It got to the point where they were tagging my family. My cousins don’t need that. It’s completely disgusting and unfair,” she says bitingly. “You have a character that goes through the scrutiny of being a sexualised person at school and then an audience that does the same thing.”

As we talk about the world’s fixation with her nude scenes, I think about how often male actors are seen as brave or experimental artists when they strip off on camera, while women are so often lessened through exposure. There are so many things I want to know but all that comes out is asking if all this makes her want to hide herself away, and because she is Sydney Sweeney she knows what I mean by ‘all this’. “Not anymore,” she says. “I think it’s ridiculous. I’m an artist, I play characters. It makes me want to play characters that piss people off more.”

Sweeney has nothing but effusive praise for the show’s writer and director Sam Levinson, despite reports – which Sweeney has denied – that she had to talk him down from including gratuitous scenes of her naked. “Those people aren’t on set, they don’t know what’s going on,” she says. “I trust Sam so much with what he does with Cassie. It feels really good as an actor to be able to trust the filmmaker because it just changes the entire experience.”

Although little is known about the show’s third season, Sweeney confirms she is set to return. What would she want for Cassie next? “There was a moment there when Cassie started learning how to manipulate Nate,” she says. “I think it would be fun to play into that power she learned she had.”

Cassie’s sway over men is one of the most interesting dynamics on Euphoria. In flashbacks in season one, we see the moment Cassie first felt family friends acting strange with her as her body changed. “I think everyone goes through their own experience of that,” Sweeney says, of the negotiations women make with what and who their bodies are for. “It almost feels like a power.”

And of course I don’t know how it feels to be traffic-stoppingly, break-the-internet sexy, but I have conflated my looks with my worth in small ways that grew into something more complicated. I have felt the thrill of realising you have something people want and the hollow chaser of understanding you cannot use it without implicating yourself. I have often cared more about being attractive than anything else, but not known who it was for. And even right now there is a part of me, in this basement, painting pottery with Sydney Sweeney, that is wondering how I look from the outside.

I think about the girls on the swim team upstairs and their faces at seeing Sweeney, the Instagram archetype of beauty made reality, and how much that person carries on their shoulders in exchange for being seen that way. I think of how sex is really about power, who gets to hold it in their hands and who has to keep reaching out for it. I think about the double-edged sword of being young and beautiful and successful and talented, and how an outsider from nowhere who people think just tumbled into Hollywood is absolutely not allowed to have her red velvet cupcake and eat it, too.

But Sweeney doesn’t say that. Sweeney sits there, painting that fragile platter with a beautiful exterior, then she looks right at me and says, “Women have to deal with a lot.”

The final layer of paint is drying on the table. On Sweeney’s platter, a perfect bouquet of flowers has blossomed in sorbet shades of pink and orange. Having covered over the acne splotches (“Lots of artists paint over their canvases!”) I am back to where we were hours ago. The only thing left to do is lamely flick some paint onto the dish in a move that feels deeply disrespectful to Jackson Pollock. “Everyone has their own version of art! It could be like… a cool? marble? hodge-podge? of colours?” Sydney Sweeney says, and she makes it sound like it could even be true.

Earlier, Doug had given her a card with his daughter’s number on it and the offer of a home-cooked meal and a friendly face, should she ever need it. Before we leave, Sweeney places it in her bag with such tenderness that, had he seen it, I think Doug might have wept. When he had finally admitted that he didn’t know who she was, Sweeney was so sweet about it. She just laughed, “I have no idea either.”

On the street a girl with braces and glasses and the fear that Sydney Sweeney might be lost forever bursts out of the door after us and starts explaining how much she loves her. They take a selfie together where Sweeney’s smile breaks like a wave that recedes gently, and they talk about Cassie and pottery and Boston and hasn’t the weather been so great!?!