It’s not every day you meet a movie star outside a vine-covered mansion in such a state of disrepair that you check your email twice just to be sure you have the right address before entering. But there Sydney Sweeney is, fresh-faced and wearing Miu Miu overalls, greeting me in the driveway of her Los Angeles home with a big smile and more energy than most would have at 9 a.m., even with all that idyllic California sunshine around. I felt right at home.
That, I will learn, is the magic of Sydney (Syd to her friends). “She’s a total renaissance woman,” Glen Powell, her costar in the blockbuster hit Anyone But You, later tells me over the phone. “I’ve never met someone who has an aptitude for so much. But the thing that really makes her a movie star, or a Glamour Woman of the Year, is that she’s able to effortlessly move through this world and be convincing in all these different things but also maintain her humanity. I think people feel that onscreen. Everybody knows she’s talented and magnetic and beautiful, and all those things, but I think her heart’s going to be what takes her the distance.”
Sweeney, 27, is so excited to give a tour of the property that she skips a little as she walks. Built in 1937, her Bel Air mansion was once the home of legendary screenwriter and 3:10 to Yuma director Delmer Daves. Sweeney was already filming Anyone But You in Australia by the time she closed on the house, so she sent her mom to be first in line at the estate sale with the directive to purchase everything inside his office so that his work could stay with the estate.
But even with its history and a location in one of LA’s swankiest neighborhoods, calling the house a fixer-upper would be a generous description. It’s currently unlivable, so she’s staying at the first home she ever purchased, a Tudor-style residence she describes as “Snow White’s chateau.”
“We’ll fix it up as much as we can without hurting any of it,” she says of the renovation process. “I don’t want anyone to walk in and be like, ‘Oh, when did you redo this?’ I want it to feel timeless, like it is.”
We settle in what will eventually become her office, where my coffee order she’d requested the day before and a well-chosen breakfast spread are waiting, and curl up on opposite leather sofas to chat about the priceless memorabilia she’s found from Hollywood’s Golden Age, such as signed autographs from legends like Cary Grant and Clark Gable.
I learn I’m the first person outside of her closest friends and family to see the place, and I’m not surprised. Sweeney has made no secret of the fact that she keeps her inner circle tight. In an industry in which part of the game seems to include being seen among the “right” group of people, Sweeney instead chooses to spend time with those who knew her Before.
“I have my family, and my cousins are my best friends,” she tells me. “I have my team and a handful of best friends. It’s very small.” With the exception of Maude Apatow, whom she met on the set of Euphoria and with whom she has remained close, “most of them—actually, all of them—are not in the industry.”
When it comes to the particularities—and peculiarities—of her chosen business, does she have anyone she can commiserate with, I ask? “Yes and no,” she replies. “We’re all on our own and very distinct journeys, and everyone’s experience with different scenarios is unique. So I can talk to people, like we all have a universal feeling about different things, but it’s a very lonely industry.”
Ironically, Sweeney didn’t watch a lot of movies or TV growing up near the Washington-Idaho border. “I’ve seen the staples of your childhood, but my parents were really against us being on electronics,” she says. Instead she and her younger brother spent much of their time outside skiing, swimming, and doing everything else you might imagine happens in a small-town, rural area of the Pacific Northwest.
Yet she’s known she wanted to be an actor since…well, Sweeney doesn’t remember when it started. The drive was just always there. It became a full-on obsession around age 12, when she saw an audition notice for a local independent film. She began making the pitch to her parents to pursue acting full-time. Where other kids would resort to begging, she made a five-year business plan in a PowerPoint presentation. It worked. For almost two years, her family drove her to Los Angeles for auditions that often ended in nothing more than a spot as a featured extra. Round trip, it took them more than 38 hours.
“I don’t think people’s perception of the world can change with hate. Hate doesn’t solve anything.”
Not everyone was as supportive as her parents. When she’s back home, there are still people she feels embarrassed around because, for a decade, they peppered her with questions: “So, is there anything I can see you on?” Or, “When are you going to come home and stop dragging your family to a hell-ridden city?” Or worst of all, “When are you going to stop breaking your family apart and wasting all their money and just go get a real job and have a real life?”
In middle school the bullying got so bad that cops talked to the other kids about the effects of such behavior. Sweeney’s parents eventually decided to relocate the family to Los Angeles before she entered high school, but it pushed them to the limit financially and emotionally. By 2016 they had divorced and filed for bankruptcy.
“There was a moment where I stopped wanting to go home, which made me really sad because I felt like a failure,” she says. “I knew that I could never actually fail because, I mean, on a very broad scale, my family did lose everything. They did get a divorce. Whether or not that was because of coming here, it definitely was a catalyst for it. So I knew I had to succeed in some capacity so that it wasn’t for nothing.”
But in Los Angeles she still found herself in a place where she didn’t quite fit in. “My first car was my grandparents’ old Volvo,” she remembers. “I had to jump-start it to get it to go. The bottom casing fell off while I was driving. Oil would spill everywhere, so I always had cardboard to put under the car so it didn’t stain anybody’s driveway.” It was a beater vehicle, made before Ford purchased the company and gave it a revamp, but Sweeney was just happy to have a car. Her classmates, meanwhile, were driving brand-new Mercedes, BMWs, and Range Rovers. “I went on a date with this one guy, and [his parents said] I wasn’t allowed to park in his driveway. My school had a small parking lot, and I had to start parking on the street because the parents said they were more worried about their kids’ cars and that my car shouldn’t be in there. It became this very disconnected reality…. I valued different things than they did.”
Sweeney doesn’t share these stories with any sense of anger or injustice. They’re just her lived experiences. “I’m never one to hold a grudge,” she says. “I don’t think people’s perception of the world can change with hate. Hate doesn’t solve anything.”
It was all a lot for a teenage girl to deal with, Sweeney admits, but she can look back with a sense of gratitude for how it shaped her. “For 20 years I was this person,” she says. “It’s just been in the last five years that my life has changed and grown. Most of my life, I was a completely normal person. You guys didn’t see it because I wasn’t famous.”
She may feel the same inside as ever, but to the outside world, it did seem a bit as though Sydney Sweeney came out of nowhere in 2018. She landed memorable roles in The Handmaid’s Tale and Sharp Objects that were soon followed by a spot in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Those alone would have been big accomplishments for an actor who has more than once been credited on IMDB as “Little Girl.” But within three years she became a household name thanks to the one-two punch of two hit HBO shows, Euphoria and White Lotus, both of which earned her Emmy nominations.
While all that success was great, this year in particular has seen Sweeney go from a rising It girl to a level of fame only found among the stars whose autographed photos now surround us in her office. She began 2024 celebrating the theatrical success of Anyone But You, a rom-com riff on Much Ado About Nothing in which she starred opposite Powell. The movie was the first that she executive-produced under her production company, Fifty-Fifty Films. It did so well at the box office that it became the highest-grossing Shakespeare adaptation of all time, crowding out beloved classics like West Side Story and 10 Things I Hate About You. Next, she hosted Saturday Night Live, starred in the big-budget superhero movie Madame Web with Dakota Johnson, and followed that with Immaculate, a gory and well-received horror movie.
It’s the latter project that gave Sweeney an opportunity to really flex her newfound power: The script was sitting in purgatory (pun intended) for a decade before the actor, looking to add a scary flick to Fifty-Fifty’s lineup, remembered it from a past audition and got it made.
“It’s a weird feeling when people are like, ‘Oh, you’re successful,’ or say, “You’ve made it,’” Sweeney says. “It doesn’t feel like that because there’s so much more I want to accomplish and achieve. I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I’d like to do in my life.”
Still to come in the next few months alone are two buzzy thrillers: Eden, a Ron Howard–directed survival epic; and Echo Valley, a drama written by Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby. Meanwhile, Sweeney has started boxing training for a biopic about Christy Martin, and even further down the line is a Barbarella remake that she says will be in the “really big, world-building sci-fi” space. In all her spare time, she’s been the face for Miu Miu, Armani Beauty, Kérastase, and Laneige.
“I’ve accomplished and bought everything myself, and I provide for myself and my family.”
“From the beginning she knew what she wanted,” says Jennifer Millar, who has represented Sweeney for over a decade. “She knew how she was going to get there, and she’s been doing it.”
Sweeney wouldn’t disagree. “I definitely think through everything that I do and every move I make,” she says. “There’s nothing that I do that is just by happenstance, but also I’m very flexible with the moves that have to be made. It’s important. This industry is like playing chess.”
Occasionally the game has frustrated her. She was recently at Disney World when she got a heads-up from her team that an online tabloid had gone into court records and found her parents’ bankruptcy filings. It was difficult for Sweeney to open up about that part of her past, and it was salt in the wound when people accused her of making it all up to seem more relatable. But the story was published to little fanfare. “The truth was put out there against my will, but then nobody cares,” she says. “All of a sudden it was like, ‘Oh wait, she actually did go through this experience,’ and it wasn’t interesting anymore.”
She still isn’t sure how to respond to tabloid firestorms. (See all that—false!—speculation about her and Glen Powell during the Anyone But You press tour.) “Do I be like, ‘No, actually, that was completely misconstrued and taken so that it became a viral story that you guys all read,’ and then people don’t believe me? Or do I just stay quiet and be like, ‘Whatever,’ and let it go?”
But there is one narrative she wants to correct: any preconceived notion that just because her fiancé, Jonathan Davino, 40, is older means he’s paying for everything. “I’m a very successful, independent woman who’s worked really hard,” she says. “I’ve accomplished and bought everything myself, and I provide for myself and my family.”
She stresses that Davino, whom she’s been dating since 2018, is not a financial backer for Fifty-Fifty Films and that his role is to serve as a sounding board. It’s also just nice to be able to talk about the thing she loves most—her work—with the people she loves most.
“I would love to set the record straight,” she says. “You can be in a healthy relationship with someone and also be very successful without needing the man. We’re teammates. We’re in it together. And we want to see each other succeed.”
She is clear that she makes her own choices, especially financially. She feels grateful that she can afford to pay off her mom’s mortgage, fly her grandparents to Italy to visit her on set, and buy her uncle’s dream boat for the family lake. It’s in those moments that she finally lets it sink in just how far she’s come.
Still, she hasn’t forgotten the precarity and the insecurity that came before. I ask if there’s a number in the bank account that would make her feel truly at ease. “I come from a family where I saw my parents lose everything, and I am terrified of that. That fear will always be instilled in me. I’m a huge saver. I don’t just go and spend money. I like to invest. I like real estate. I like making, hopefully, smart choices with the money I’m making. But I don’t think I’ll ever actually feel comfortable.”
Fame doesn’t last forever, she adds. “You make one wrong move, [and] it’s gone.”
Almost as soon as Sweeney became famous, if not before, came the weird and constant discourse about her body. The actor has what she claims her grandparents themselves dubbed “the best tits in Hollywood,” which of course means everyone has an opinion about how much or little the actor should draw attention to them. “Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?” went one particularly unhinged take.
On the positive side, she says a lot of the comments she gets from young fans are about how she’s made them feel more confident with their body. “That means a lot to me because I really believe in empowering others and feeling powerful with your body and embracing your sexuality,” she says. “And if you have boobs, great. Flaunt them.”
But lately photographers have started going to extreme measures because of it. They recently showed up at Sweeney’s new home in Florida and started yelling at her family who were outside. “They said, ‘If you tell her to just come outside in a bikini, I’ll take pictures and then I’ll leave you alone,’” she says. On social media, people speculated that she had called the paparazzi herself, something she vehemently denies. “Why would I call the paparazzi to take pictures of me at my own house when my baby cousins and family are there and I’m in my backyard? Why would I ever want that? I have pictures of these guys in kayaks hiding in bushes in the ocean. They got there at 8 a.m. and wouldn’t leave until 4 p.m. I should be able to be in my home and feel comfortable and safe.”
It’s not that the photographers themselves bother her so much. It’s that she’s conscious of how easy it is to find her location online—for people to zero in on where she lives, to skulk around her house. I see this in practice firsthand: While we’re talking in her driveway, a woman drives slowly by and waves. There was a moment of confusion—was it my Uber? A stranger? When Sweeney and I realized neither of us recognized the car, we moved quickly and awkwardly to a less visible area.
“When those photos go out, then my actual safety is at risk,” Sweeney says. “Everyone knows where I am. Now there’s boats that go by, and I literally hear them say, ‘This is Sydney Sweeney’s house.’ It becomes a star tour in my front yard.”
The unnatural experience of that level of sudden fame has driven young starlets to the brink before, but if anyone is equipped to deal with all of [gesturing around] this, Sweeney seems more than capable. She has no vices that I can determine. She rarely drinks. She hasn’t even tried coffee. Her love language is quality time with that tight inner circle. After a big event like the Met Gala, she skips the after-parties and goes home. She likes browsing Pinterest, where her feed is usually filled with interior design or dogs. Some of the few people capable of making her feel starstruck are Mariska Hargitay, the Property Brothers, and impressive skiers—and not necessarily in that order.
“I don’t think she has changed at all,” says Millar when I ask about Sweeney then versus now. “Anybody who knows Syd, knows that when she can go back home and kick off the heels and play with her dog, that’s who she is.”
“As a friend, she’s so thoughtful,” Powell agrees. “Sometimes, the perception of people when they’re incredibly ambitious or business-minded can be that they neglect other things in their life. She’s just the opposite. The people that are in her world, in her court, she’s known for taking care of them. She’s the type of person that remembers birthdays and remembers your favorite dessert and your mom’s favorite dessert…. She’s just a very thoughtful, very present human being.”
Present, but always with an eye on the future. When I ask Sydney Sweeney what she sees for the road ahead, she doesn’t hesitate: “Just keep working.”
