Sydney Sweeney has responded to being called a “Maga Barbie”, saying she has “never been here to talk about politics”.
The Euphoria star addressed the controversy over her American Eagle jeans advertisement from last year that made her a darling of the right-wing online circles in a cover story for Cosmopolitan.
The actor, 28, became the face of the brand’s “Great Jeans” campaign, which drew intense scrutiny over its use of "jeans" as a play on the word “genes”.
Critics interpreted the wordplay as a reference to eugenics, the discredited theory of improving humanity through selective breeding. American Eagle has maintained that the advert solely refers to its denim products.
However, the Maga camp quickly came to Sweeney’s defence, so much so that Sweeney got assigned a moniker online: Maga Barbie. US president Donald Trump praised the actor when he found out she was a registered Republican, writing on social media that she had “the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there”.
“Those aren’t my values,” Sweeney told Cosmopolitan, in an interview published on Friday, “but I feel like I’ve never needed to correct people who don’t know who I am.”
“It’s definitely not a comfortable thing to have people saying what you believe or think, especially when that doesn’t align with you. It’s been a weird thing having to navigate and digest, because it’s not me. None of it is me,” the actor said, responding to a question about how the narrative around her political beliefs was built despite her saying nothing.
“And I’m having to watch it happen. I’m online and I see things, but I’m slowly pulling myself away. It’s definitely gone to a level where it’s just not healthy for me to digest it all.”
In November, Sweeney had addressed the criticism in an interview with GQ magazine, stating: “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear”.
However, the following month she admitted to People magazine that her silence had “widened the divide” and she didn’t “support the views some people chose to connect to the campaign”.
The Housemaid star has now said that she still does not intend to talk about politics and prefers the conversation stay focused on her work as an actor.
“I’ve never been here to talk about politics. I’ve always been here to make art, so this is just not a conversation I want to be at the forefront of. And I think because of that, people want to take it even further and use me as their own pawn. But it’s somebody else assigning something to me, and I can’t control that,” she said.
“I’m not a political person. I’m in the arts. I’m not here to speak on politics. That’s not an area I’ve ever even imagined getting into. It’s not why I became who I am. I became an actor because I like to tell stories, but I don’t believe in hate in any form. I believe we should all love each other and have respect and understanding for one another.”
She hadn’t “figured out” how to control the narrative once it was already in motion since people might assume she was changing her stance to “look better”.
“There’s no winning. There’s never any winning. I just have to continue being who I am, because I know who I am. I can’t make everyone love me. I know what I stand for.”
Sweeney has also been promoting the launch of her forthcoming lingerie line, Syrn, but may have landed in legal trouble after an unconventional promotional stunt. She recently climbed the iconic Hollywood sign in Los Angeles to hang a clothesline of bras on its 45-foot-tall letters.
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