How Sydney Sweeney relied on Taylor Swift during harrowing scenes
Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1984 dystopian novel, the television series The Handmaid’s Tale put her chilling vision of a society – with a declining birth rate forcing fertile women to bear children for the wealthy – on the small screen with a devasting effect. While there were certain tweaks to Atwood’s original material, like the inclusion of smartphones, the show had a piercing cultural relevance that bordered on the bleak. Sydney Sweeney, who played a Handmaid called Eden in the show, was forced to look to an unlikely source of relief in between scenes.
Initially, Sweeney was thrilled to be cast in the second series of the drama. She had watched the first season with her mother and said they “fell in love with the show together”. But she soon found portraying such harrowing material made watching it very different. “I know what actually goes on whilst filming [now],” she said. “But it’s fun watching her reaction to different scenes or different storylines and I just disconnect myself from being in it.”
Even aside from the baseline oppression that takes root in the show, it can be an incredibly tough watch, which goes some way to explaining Sweeney’s want to separate herself from it. Women are tortured, murdered, and sexually assaulted almost en masse. Sweeney’s character, Eden, marries a middle-aged man, Nick, as a teenager, but despite the role’s inherent darkness, Sweeney said it was a step away from her usual characters.
“I would always worry that I was only going to play the girl next door or the cute girlfriend,” she admitted to Glamour. “But I’ve been really lucky that all my roles have been very intense and completely different kinds of characters. I’ve been able to work on shows with amazing role models, amazing actors, incredible female filmmakers. It’s been really cool to see the industry change and be part of that change.”
On the intensity of playing Eden, she revealed music was a huge help. “The cast and the crew are beyond hilarious, and we would just goof off whenever the cameras weren’t rolling or sing Taylor Swift,” she said. Max Minghella, who plays her on-screen husband Nick, apparently knew all of the songs from 2017’s Reputation.
Some of the crew were big fans of The Bachelor, so they all had some light relief in discussing that, too, and Sweeney took to avidly reading as another mental break from the show. “I was also doing school at the time,” she said, “So I would have to run to the trailer, grab some books, and try to read as much as I could before I had to go back on set. So there were a lot of things distracting me from the horrors that we were actually filming.”
