The key to Sydney Sweeney, discourse magnet and actor, used to be Madame Web. It was an infamous disaster of a Spider-Man spin-off in early 2024, famed for flopping, and for lengthy scenes in which its star – a perpetually bemused Dakota Johnson – couldn’t seem to open a can of Coke. On the film’s press tour, Johnson seemed to be mortified that she was headlining such a thing, practically begging audiences not to see it from beneath her trademark fringe. Sweeney, a supporting player in the film and a nascent superstar at the time of its release, took a different approach: Madame Web was a business deal, she said, and a professional means to an end.
“To me, that film was a building block; it’s what allowed me to build a relationship with Sony,” Sweeney told GQ in the aftermath of the movie’s release. “Without doing Madame Web, I wouldn’t have a relationship with the decision-makers over there. Everything in my career I do not just for that story, but strategic business decisions.”
And with that, Sydney Sweeney: Actor, Mogul and Businesswoman was born. The then 26-year-old seemed like an individual who had a very clear sense of who she was and what she wanted from her career, and possessed the acumen and ambition to achieve it. Her choices were smart, too: her sleeper hit Anyone But You, which she executive produced, filled a romcom-shaped hole in the cultural fabric in 2023, and proved she could open a movie; that same year, her small-scale drama Reality, about an NSA whistleblower, showcased the way that she can disappear into a role and find subtlety and grit far beyond the messy, “can’t-believe-she-just-did-that” mania she exhibits in Euphoria, the TV show that shot her to fame.
So why, exactly, have the wheels of Sweeney’s moguldom seemed to fly off this year? A series of baffling PR moves have sent her torpedoing into a difficult no man’s land of celebrity. Other famous people have become comfortable publicly condemning her, from more notoriously reactionary types like the model Ruby Rose – who this week called Sweeney a “cretin” – to SZA, Christina Ricci, Aimee Lou Wood and Dan Stevens, all of whom have been seen to “like” or share comments on social media that criticise the star. The digital attention economy is revelling in every one of her recent professional and personal setbacks. The alt-right is currently using a screenshot of her face from a recent GQ video interview as an anti-left meme. And thanks to Sweeney, that old axiom that “all publicity is good publicity” seems suddenly outdated.
Between the headlines, her relentless appearances in ad campaigns, and the four films she’s had out (a fifth is also due this Christmas), Sweeney has undoubtedly been one of the most important women in culture in 2025 – but in the same way that Donald Trump was twice anointed Time’s Person of the Year. It’s not necessarily down to what someone has done or not done; it’s more because the noise that surrounds them is so deafening that there’s no other choice.
Sweeney’s recent run of woe has been exacerbated by lots of factors outside of her control. Her widely discussed American Eagle jeans ad, in which she boasted of her great genetics, was vague enough in its messaging that it was no real surprise when hysterically minded individuals from across the political spectrum read all kinds of white supremacist madness into it. A tedious fixation on box office figures, shared by film fans and outlets, has also shone an unfair spotlight on Sweeney’s movies lately. A low-budget indie like Americana was never going to break big, likewise Ron Howard’s oddball thriller Eden, which struggled to find distribution before coughing into selected US cinemas in August (it washed up on Prime Video this month in the UK). And Christy, Sweeney’s new boxing biopic, may have bombed this weekend in the US, but, sadly, so have many adult-aimed dramas in recent weeks, among them the not-very-good Julia Roberts vehicle After the Hunt, and the incredibly good Jennifer Lawrence psycho-thriller Die My Love.
But Sweeney has very much laid the groundwork for all of this by choosing to be incredibly visible in the public eye this year, and by doing things that seem confusing at best, and deeply misjudged at worst. The American Eagle campaign came after she’d appeared in a bizarre advert promoting limited edition soap made (allegedly) from her bathwater. It also trailed an ad campaign she appeared in for Baskin-Robbins ice cream, which similarly felt as though it was beneath a star of her stature. Her associations with online super-villains (she was in attendance at Jeff Bezos’s wedding, and has been photographed kissing Taylor Swift’s arch-nemesis Scooter Braun this month) only drove home the feeling that she’s lost sight of her public image. Or, at least, of what can actually benefit her rather than harm her.
Sweeney has largely maintained a quasi-dignified silence while controversy has raged around her, but even that has felt like the wrong move. Asked by GQ last week to comment on the American Eagle snafu, she merely insisted that it was “just” a jeans ad, that Trump’s commentary on it was “surreal”, and that she had more or less ignored it all at the time. Asked further to comment on allegations that the ad suggested Sweeney’s whiteness made her genetically superior, she said: “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”
I can understand Sweeney’s impulse to take the high road and say nothing. But it is Public Relations 101 that a star must set the tone for their public image themselves. Without cultivating said tone, or even participating in the discourse around how they’re being spoken about, a star can be left flailing in the wind. Sweeney, by saying little, has become a blank canvas for all kinds of narratives to be placed upon her: she is a victim, a girlboss, a monster, a naif, someone who is deeply ignorant, or an entrepreneurial genius playing 4D chess with the world’s media.
Her brand, therefore, has become confused and precarious. The Housemaid, her December thriller with Amanda Seyfried, will likely be a hit, given that its source material – Freida McFadden’s bestseller of the same name – was a BookTok smash. But it’s likely that its promotion will be swallowed up by the sheer magnitude of her current infamy. Meanwhile, the same people now holding Sweeney up as an anti-woke super-goddess were happy to write hideous things about her appearance when she put on muscle to play the boxer Christy Martin earlier this year. They can hardly be trusted to be a consistent fanbase. And while Sweeney is obviously entitled to keep her politics private, she has never commented on being registered to vote as a Republican – a fact that emerged in August via publicly available records. Would it damage Sweeney to properly discuss her politics? It’s a possibility. But at this point, it’s probably safer than allowing her story to be entirely dictated by others.
Caught up in all of this, too, is the fact that Sweeney is a brilliant actor. Christy, in UK cinemas later this month, is a deeply traditional, inspirational sports movie biopic, full of wonky wigs and clichés. But Sweeney is quite marvellous in it. Playing a closeted boxer married to an abusive man, Sweeney refuses to martyr her character, or portray her as a saint. She switches between cruel malevolence and aching vulnerability, and then back again. It’s a carefully modulated performance that – if not for absolutely all of the above – probably could have got her an Oscar nomination.
Instead, though, Christy doesn’t seem to matter. While we exist in an era in which scandals are forgotten about with speed, and difficult public figures can be successfully rehabilitated with time, Sweeney’s current woes seem oddly stuck. Forget politics or bad ad campaigns: the most dangerous thing for Sydney Sweeney right now is that she’s lost control of her own story. And I have no idea if there’s a way back from that.
