“I’m obsessed with her”: the actor Sydney Sweeney called her forever icon
One of the best traits you can have as a human is not to care about what people think of you, which isn’t easy, because it’s usually natural to want others to like you.
Actors are usually pretty good with this because they have to do all manner of embarrassing things onscreen, and on top of that, Sydney Sweeney has to deal with seemingly endless abuse on the internet as well.
Which makes it all the more impressive that she has taken on the kind of roles she has over the past few years, across genres and playing characters that many would shy away from, and her performances are way, way above the level of many of her peers who don’t get the kind of derision she does.
But then Sweeney has been learning her craft longer than people think, despite gaining fame and acclaim for the teen drama Euphoria and The Handmaid’s Tale in 2019, she has been appearing in films since as far back as 2009, and after she was Emmy-nominated in 2021 for her work on the sassy whodunnit The White Lotus in 2021 she has really ramped things up. The following year, she made Reality, the true story of a former US National Security Agent who was handed the longest ever prison sentence for the leaking of information related to Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. The film was nominated for several industry awards, and Sweeney was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award.
In 2024, she not only starred in but also produced the superb ‘scary nuns’ horror Immaculate, which was critically acclaimed and made four times its budget at the box office. Another fully committed performance came in the boxing movie Christy last year, which struggled badly at cinemas and saw Sweeney come under fire from online commenters despite her dedication to the character that saw her gain three stones in weight and train religiously.
She has shown her range over the past five years or so by also making surprising word-of-mouth hits like the comedy Anyone But You with Glen Powell, which was a massive hit in 2023, and 2025’s The Housemaid alongside Amanda Seyfried, which again did huge numbers, the psychological thriller earning close to $400million worldwide on a budget of just $35m.
Sweeney was particularly taken with Seyfried after working with her on the film, telling Jimmy Fallon recently, “Did I know Amanda before this? I’m obsessed with her. She knows how much I am with her. I am like the biggest Mamma Mia! fan”.
Seyfried was just 23 when she made the 2008 musical movie opposite legends including Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, the ABBA-inspired flick bringing in a global box office of over $600m and earning a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Picture’. Seyfried, for her part, seems to feel the same as her The Housemaid co-star, saying of Sweeney, “I think she’s beautiful and fun. And we definitely love what we do, and we love the project so much, so it’s infectious”.
As well as returning for a third season of HBO’s Euphoria in April, Sweeney will now also be making several new films, including a turn-of-the-century epic called Custom of the Country, a Kim Novak biopic called Scandalous! and a thriller titled I Pretended to be a Missing Girl.
