The movie that gave Sydney Sweeney imposter syndrome: “Am I supposed to be here?”
In just a handful of years, Sydney Sweeney has shown that she is a multi-faceted star who can’t be type-cast. She first grabbed viewers’ attention for her roles in the HBO series Sharp Objects and Everything Sucks!, two vastly different performances that were filmed concurrently. Following minor appearances in The Handmaid’s Tale and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, she landed her breakthrough role in the controversial HBO series Euphoria, in which she played a popular high schooler with a complicated romantic life.
The show made her a star, and with her outstanding performance and bombshell looks, it could easily have led to a career in similar roles. But Sweeney has consistently bucked that trend, going out of her way to choose a range of roles that defy typecasting.
In the span of just one year, she played real-life NSA leaker Reality Winner in Tina Satter’s crime drama Reality, a law student in the romantic comedy Anyone But You, and a nun who becomes mysteriously pregnant in Michael Mohan’s surprisingly stellar horror movie Immaculate. She even produced the latter two, showing that, at just 27, she has industry aspirations beyond acting.
Despite the hard-won respect she has already earned in Hollywood, Sweeney revealed in a recent interview that she felt intimidated by her fellow actors on the set of one of her upcoming films. Speaking with Collider at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sweeney discussed her latest venture, a psychological thriller about a group of people searching for a new way of life on the Galápagos Islands. Directed by Ron Howard, Eden stars Sweeney, Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, and Daniel Brühl.
“I felt like I just had imposter syndrome the whole time I was there working with Daniel and Jude and Ana and Vanessa and Ron,” Sweeney said of the experience. “Every day I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I cannot believe I’m here. Am I supposed to be here? Did they make a mistake? Am I the wrong person?’ So for me, I was nervous. I faced a lot of fears just even being there because everyone is such an amazing actor. I was like, ‘What am I doing?’”
Eden is loosely based on the true story of the settlers of Floreana Island. In the late 1920s, a German doctor and his partner became internationally famous for setting up a homestead on the island. A few years later, another family arrived, consisting of a man, his pregnant wife, and their teenage son. Shortly thereafter, an Austrian woman claiming to be a baroness arrived with several servants in tow. The group of settlers turned out to be an inharmonious bunch, leading to one of the great unsolved mysteries of the decade.
It’s a promising set-up, but when Eden premiered in Toronto in September, it received decidedly mixed reviews and struggled to find a distributor. Many critics called it a surprisingly bleak film for Howard, who is known for his rousing, feel-good movies like Apollo 13 and Rush. With such a starry cast, however, it’s bound to be entertaining purely for spectacle, if not for substance.
