This column, and others, have had a bit to say about Sydney Sweeney. It was in April of 2024 that we celebrated the arrival of an old-school movie star. Attracting different sorts of acclaim in the political drama Reality and the horror film Immaculate, the American firecracker looked to be unstoppable. She entered 2025 as a widely popular phenomenon. Yet she leaves it as a divisive figure.
It would be absurd to suggest anyone so ubiquitously visible had been “cancelled”, but a huge, self-righteous section of the online commentariat has turned against her.
Just look at the response to the news that she was to be paired with Ethan Hawke in one of Variety magazine’s Actors on Actors videos for awards season. “The face of a man who just had the most inane conversation of his life,” someone said of Hawke a week before a word of the conversation had been heard. “Poor Ethan, with the gene girl, queen of flop,” another quipped. And on and on.
The argument was that Hawke was being placed beside a talentless neophyte who was there only because of her looks. This is not remotely so. She received raves for the TV series Euphoria and The White Lotus. “Sweeney’s performance has a superb micro-calibration as she plays it calm and noncommittal,” the Guardian said of Reality in 2023. “Sydney Sweeney is extraordinary in this Oscar-tipped movie,” the Times said of her turn as the boxer Christy Martin in the recent biopic Christy.
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She earned consistently excellent reviews for that film, but, following its indecently celebrated commercial failure, the online mass gave the impression that Sweeney had made a pig’s ear of the role. “You’re a cretin and you ruined the film. Period,” the Australian actor Ruby Rose ranted on Threads. “Christy deserved better.”
What the heck is going on? The key fulcrum looks to have been confusion around an advertisement Sweeney fronted for American Eagle jeans in July. Space prohibits comprehensive explanation of the controversy, but many took offense to its tagline: “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” The implied pun with “genes” was seen as white supremacist or eugenicist or something.
Unsurprisingly, Sweeney initially stayed mum about the furore, but, after five months of yelling, she eventually allowed herself to express bewilderment. “I don’t support the views some people chose to connect to the campaign,” she told People magazine recently. “Many have assigned motives and labels to me that just aren’t true.”
The other bone of contention was the apparent revelation that she registered to vote as a Republican in Florida on June 14th, 2024. In an earlier era this would have caused barely a flutter of controversy. Barbara Stanwyck, William Holden and Ginger Rogers were all Republican, but no great mass yelled for their cancellation.
These are, however, more fraught times. The battle lines between Republicans and Democrats seems, in the United States, now comparable to those between mainstream politics and communism in Stanwyck’s time. Too few are prepared to give an inch.
The Sweeney story has, predictably enough, caused some donning of tin hats in conservative circles. “Sydney Sweeney is only ‘controversial’ because she’s not a Leftie luvvie,” a Daily Telegraph columnist bellowed this week.
Really? The perception that she opposes lefty luvvieness – which is still little more than a guess – has certainly accelerated this unsightly backlash, but it is wrong to imply that “only” right-wing people are so targeted. Any young woman whose ideas look to be above what the mob sees as “her station” can find herself in the crosshairs.
Consider the case of Rachel Zegler. The hugely talented star of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story found herself deluged with online abuse when, cast as the lead in Disney’s recent remake of Snow White, she made some mild remarks about the original film’s dubious sexual politics. Her claim that the 1937 version had “a big focus on her love story with a guy who literally stalks her” sent Maga sites cuckoo-bananas.
Zegler’s advocacy of other progressive issues fanned the conflagration. The (ahem) Daily Telegraph, following the remake’s financial failure, quoted, in a headline, the producer’s son arguing that “Snow White star’s woke politics caused film flop”.
One of the happier entertainment stories of 2025 was about Zegler’s subsequent triumph in a West End production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Evita. Each night she emerged to receive hurrahs, as, proud on an exterior balcony, she delivered Don’t Cry for Me Argentina to a packed side street by the Palladium Theatre.
In two weeks Sweeney appears opposite Amanda Seyfried in Paul Feig’s psychological thriller The Housemaid. Let us hope the adaptation of Freida McFadden’s hit novel is a success of similar proportions. We need the braying masses to quieten down. We need movie stars to be movie stars. It is, after all, the season of peace and good will.
