“I won’t stop doing them”: why you’ll have to prise Sydney Sweeney’s nude scenes from her cold, dead hands
While it’s easy to overlook, given that she’s become an increasingly controversial and polarising presence for several reasons, Sydney Sweeney is actually a pretty good actor when given the right material.
Obviously, in certain corners of the internet and online discourse, she’s been pegged as one thing and one thing only, and in other corners of it, she’s been pegged as another thing and another thing only. That comes with the territory of being a zeitgeist-grabbing star, but don’t let it overshadow the work.
Admittedly, the endless what-the-fuckery of whatever the final season of Euphoria’s final season was supposed to be didn’t do her any favours, with Sweeney’s Cassie spending almost all of her screentime in various forms of undress as part of a storyline that didn’t sit too well with many folks, whether they were viewers of the show or not.
On the other hand, she’s a two-time Primetime Emmy-nominated performer, one who’s shown underrated and unsung dramatic chops in the horror flick Immaculate, the biographical drama Reality, and even the sports drama Christy, despite its miserable showing at the box office in the face of an offscreen firestorm that she paid very little heed to.
No actor wants to be defined as someone who’s best known for getting naked onscreen, and having shot nude scenes in Euphoria, The Voyeurs, The Housemaid, and others, you could easily see her falling into that trap. However, Sweeney doesn’t see it as a trap at all. In fact, no matter what the critics say, there’s little chance she’ll be abandoning the idea of getting her kit off on-camera anytime soon.
“People forget that I’m playing a character,” she explained. “They think, ‘Oh, she gets naked onscreen; she’s a sex symbol’. And I can’t get past that. I have no problems with those scenes, and I won’t stop doing them, but I wish there was an easier way to have an open conversation about what we’re assuming about actors in the industry.”
A valid point, one that she doubled down on by pointing out that “there are hour-long compilations of world-famous male actors with nude scenes who win Oscars and get praised for that work,” which Sweeney views as a hypocritical double-edged sword, because “the moment a woman does it, it degrades them.” Again, it’s not like she’s pulling these criticisms out of thin air.
The 1993 phone call from Michael Jackson that “flummoxed” Stephen King: “We’re going to shock the world”
The boycotted 2013 movie that caused a “real dilemma” for Harrison Ford: “Should I not have made the film?”
The career-defining 1994 role that almost caused Cameron Diaz a nervous breakdown: “I got an ulcer”
“There’s such a double-standard,” she added, which is far from untrue. “And I really hope I can have a little part in changing that.” To do that, she’ll support anyone, anywhere who’s been asked to film a nude scene in her presence, which recently included Jude Law, who bared all in Ron Howard’s already forgotten survival drama, Eden.
Noting that she’s “always very supportive of nudity, of sexual scenes, if the story or the character warrants it,” Sweeney admitted she “wanted to cheer for that” when her co-star was acting in the buff. As much as it’s come to define her onscreen persona to a certain extent, for better or worse, depending on who you ask and how they spend their free time, she won’t be turning her back on them for the foreseeable future.
