Sydney Sweeney Is Owning Her Narrative

With Euphoria season 2 in the rearview mirror, her eyes are on the future and what she can build next.

Six months ago, Syd’s Garage still felt like a secret — a fun thing for people in the know. Did you see that Sydney Sweeney makes TikToks of herself fixing up a red 1969 Ford Bronco? The car was something for herself. The TikTok was for her family so that her mom could see her progress and share it with her grandma and aunts and uncles. The New Hollywood 2022 inductee doesn’t say outright that it’s less fun now when her most recent videos have amassed more than 7 million views. Instead, she offers an anecdote: “I was driving my blue Mustang and it got followed, and I was like, ‘How did they know?’ My friend was like, ‘You posted it on your TikTok,”’ Sweeney tells Teen Vogue over a zoom call, laughing it off. “I was just going to get ice cream.”

With Sweeney, there’s what she’s saying, and there’s what she’s saying. Then there’s how it’s interpreted by journalists, by fans, and then filtered through a bad-faith social media ecosystem that tends to make everything look worse on the other side. And always, always more eyes on her with each new character she embodies. She began her career as a young teen, her parents driving her from their home near the Washington/Idaho border to Los Angeles for auditions. Years of bit parts. Then: Sharp Objects, Everything Sucks!, The Handmaid’s Tale, Euphoria, The White Lotus. Now: A bonafide TV star and producer at 24 years old, with an inclination toward unreliable narrators, conflicted-yet-brutal teen heroines, young people with something to prove.

She recently drove a more anonymous car for a 12-hour road trip to the set of her next film National Anthem, her rescued German shepherd-and-dalmatian mix, Tank, by her side. With Euphoria season 2 in the rearview mirror, her eyes are on the future and what she can build next.

Sweeney is invested in learning (almost) everything, in doing the work, and earning her continued success. The Players Table is the first project of her company Fifty-Fifty Films, and it’s a perfect example of the kinds of stories she’s interested in: adaptations of books by first-time female authors (Jessica Goodman’s They Wish They Were Us, in this case), set in heightened high school experiences that make up for her pretty boring real-life one. The main character may or may not be telling the truth, and the story itself is about the lengths people will go to in order to belong, the evils of hazing and social hierarchies, and the dark advantages of privilege.

Sweeney is deeply collaborative, finds joy in discovering good people to work with, especially people with more experience she can learn from. (Case in point: Her Bronco is currently in the garage back in LA, about to receive a new leather interior from a professional. “I can’t sew leather, I don’t know how to do that,” she says. “If I was there, I’d probably try to teach myself.”)

But there are growing pains to that learning. She recently shared a story about fighting to get Fifty Fifty’s credit on a project she produced and being told no, and she revisits the experience now. She’s careful to say she understands, she’s grateful just to learn, but also… “I put a lot of work into what I do,” she says haltingly. “I would never want to have my name or company just slapped on something because I want it slapped on. I will be doing the heavy lifting.”

You can hear it in what she says she values about Fifty Fifty, working with authors who hadn’t been given a chance to see their work on screen. “Being able to make a dream of theirs that they didn’t think was possible for years and years happen, is amazing — to never put a limit to what their capabilities are because they’re female, or their age, or their background,” she says. That extends to up-and-coming directors and screenwriters, people she’d love to create opportunities for in the future. “I’m a big advocate for making sure everybody’s voice is heard.”

Amy Harrity

Here’s something that’s important to Sydney Sweeney: context. It’s what allows her to compartmentalize the onscreen nudity that almost every interview touches upon. She knows people might not understand that stance or agree that it’s possible. “I truly say, That’s Cassie’s nude or That’s Pippa’s nude,” she told Teen Vogue back in September 2021.

The problem is that the world we live in cares very little about context — a scene that makes sense for a character becomes a screenshot she’s tagged in on Instagram, and then a collection of them, and then an assumption about who Sweeney might be as a person.

Much has been made of Sweeney talking about Cassie’s nudity in Euphoria as of late and of creator Sam Levinson’s approach to nude scenes with the show’s female actors. In an interview with The Independent from January 2022, Sweeney said, “There are moments where Cassie was supposed to be shirtless and I would tell Sam, ‘I don’t really think that’s necessary here.’ He was like, ‘Okay, we don’t need it.’ I’ve never felt like Sam has pushed it on me or was trying to get a nude scene into an HBO show. When I didn’t want to do it, he didn’t make me.” It was transformed, however, into a number of blogs with variations on the headline: Sydney Sweeney Asked to Cut Unnecessary Nude Scenes From Euphoria.

“I never asked him to cut any scenes,” Sweeney tells Teen Vogue firmly. “It got twisted and turned and it became its own beast, and I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’” There’s something like a frustrated giddiness to her voice, another slight laugh. The anecdote is now part of larger stories about what goes on behind the scenes in Euphoria, tied together with more oft-aggregated interviews with Minka Kelly, Chloe Cherry, and Martha Kelly, each of which adds its own important context to the way they talk about nudity on the show. But the point Sweeney was trying to get across was actually about Levinson paying attention to boundaries: “It was more how respectful Sam is and how incredible of a director he is, that he would never make me do something I didn’t feel comfortable with.” Ultimately, her allegiance is with Cassie. “I think it’s important to the storyline and the character,” she says. “There’s a purpose to what that character is going through. That’s the character. We all get naked in real life. We show this character’s life and what they’re going through. Cassie’s body is a different form of communication for her.”

Sweeney is someone who keeps something for herself in a landscape of overexposure and oversharing. “Syd is the real me,” she told Cosmopolitan earlier this year, adding that sometimes on set, she’ll get comfortable, and some parts of Syd will come out from under the professional veneer. The vulnerability is scary. She fears that people might not understand her when they don’t truly know her. “There’s also just a fear of the toxic culture of social media,” she says now, “and how it can destroy everything that’s in its path.”

Lately, she’s been thinking about interviews on a macro level. “No matter what I say, it’s never my words,” she says. “There’s no context behind a conversation, like what you and I are having right now. People create their own narratives around a word or sentence that is said that is rewritten. Do I stand up for myself and then people don’t believe I’m standing up for myself, but [that I’m just] going back on words that I say? But really they were rewritten by someone else.” Would she ever get to the point where she doesn’t do interviews, where she’s so accomplished she doesn’t have to? It’s less about accomplishment, she says. “Why do interviews when it’s not really our words?”

She’s gentle as she says this — she seems to know that the goal of interviews like this one is to tell a story about her that isn’t being told, to get to the heart of who she is as a person, and to explore what people say about her and what that says about our cultural values. But no matter what, it’s filtered through another person’s lens and she doesn’t have control over that: “That’s the biggest hurdle, is when people don’t get that.”

Sydney Sweeney wears an Alexander McQueen jacket, Alexander McQueen trousers, Manolo Blahnik shoes, and Anabela Chan earrings.Amy Harrity

Here’s some context: Sweeney grew up in a house that was perpetually under construction, thanks to her parents’ love of remodeling. She loved HGTV and the Property Brothers. She can picture her childhood bedroom, with its light green walls and a bedroom set that her dad built, a trunk full of blankets her nana knitted, and so many books she loved to read. She can close her eyes and go back there, and it feels like a safe space.

The family left “her mom’s dream house” to move to L.A. so Sweeney could act. And then her dad lost his job, which led to bankruptcy. They lived in a Burbank Holiday Inn for nine months when she was 16 years old. Then her parents divorced, and she’s said that though they told her it wasn’t her fault, she feels like it was. She purchased a home of her own this year and has been wallpapering and teaching herself how to do the remodeling. “I’ve been able to give it my love,” she says. “It makes me feel like I’m [in my childhood] home when I’m doing that kind of stuff.”

It was her parents who were the first ones to take her seriously. They taught her how to stand up for herself. Maybe she forgot that lesson for a little while as a teenager who felt like if she didn’t do something a director asked her to, she wouldn’t work again. But, at 24, she’s not afraid to stand up for herself when the time calls for it. She has new fears now, about people putting words in her mouth or making their own narratives about her, but her fundamental goal is to be herself — goofy and honest and open and thoughtful, surrounded by the life she has built. No matter what happens on social media or in interviews, she has her family, her dog, her vintage cars, her DIY projects that remind her of home.

If Sweeney could choose the questions for this interview, she’d want to talk about the mildly horrific dirt biking injury she sustained when she was 15 and a half. She toppled over the handlebars on a jump, tore her MCL and part of her ACL, and wore a brace from hip to ankle for eight months. Then compounded the injury while trying to shave her legs, fell on her ankle, and took out a big chunk of skin, she recounts somewhat gleefully. Sweeney gets close to the Zoom camera to show off the wakeboarding scar she got when she was 11 years old, near her left eye. Maybe she’s thinking about childhood, sports teams, and old injuries she can still feel when it’s cold out, being part of something, and her parents driving her home from practice at the end of a long day.

“I miss it all,” she says, her laugh fading. “I miss it all.” Tank barks in the background, a signal that it’s time to go.


CREDITS

Editor in Chief: Versha Sharma

Photographer/Director: Amy Harrity

Photo Assistant: Gal Harpaz

Director of Photography: Erynn Patrick

1st AC: Bobby Lamont

Video Editor: Arjun Srivatsa

Stylist: Savannah White

Stylist Assistant: Mauricio Gonzalez

Tailor: Irina Tyan

Hairstylist: Oscar Pallares Gomez

Hair Assistant: Kelly Duong

Makeup Artist: Shideh Kafei

Makeup Assistant: Laura Dudley

Manicurist: Kimberly Zuniga

Prop Stylist: Jessie Cundiff

Prop Assistant: Tessa Trozzolillo

Production: Hyperion LA

Art Director: Emily Zirimis

Senior Fashion Editor: Tchesmeni Leonard

Visual Editor: Louisiana Gelpi

Designer: Liz Coulbourn

Executive Editor: Dani Kwateng

Features Director: Brittney Mcnamara

Senior Entertainment Editor: Eugene Shevertalov

Senior Culture Editor: P. Claire Dodson

Senior Director of Creative Development: Mi-Anne Chan

Senior Social Media Manager: Honestine Fraser

Social Media Manager: Ysenia Valdez

Associate Manager, Audience Development: Ashley Wolfgang