Sydney Sweeney: "My body doesn’t define who I am.” (2024)

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, ‘f*ck, 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 f*ck 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.”

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.