‘It proves we’re great actors’: Sydney Sweeney on the frenzy over her Australian romcom

At the premiere screening of Reality at the Berlinale in February, Sydney Sweeney, who stars as the NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, was seated directly in front of Winner’s real-life family. It’s the kind of anxiety-inducing situation that could make an actor question their life choices.

Winner herself wasn’t there watching the film because she remains under house arrest in Texas even though she was released from prison in June 2021, four years into a five-year, three-month sentence for leaking a classified report about Russian interference in the 2016 US election. But Winner’s mother was moved.

“Honestly, it’s a memory I’ll never forget,” Sweeney says of the screening. “Her mum was crying. She said she felt like she was watching her daughter on screen, and that she’d gained another daughter. It was very moving and very powerful.”

Sweeney plays NSA whistleblower Reality Winner in the tense new film.Credit: Lily Olsen/HBO/AP

The film, directed by Tina Satter, who wrote and directed the play Is This a Room on which the film is based, premiered at the Sydney Film Festival this week and will open in cinemas nationally later this month. At 25, Sweeney’s subtle and nuanced performance as Reality has earned her the best reviews of her career to date. “Sweeney has finally got her serious actor moment and delivered,” wrote critic David Fear in Rolling Stone. “Across 85 taut minutes [Reality] proves something we already knew deep down: that Sydney Sweeney is the real deal,” wrote Steph Green for Indiewire. If she’s been on the verge in recent years, Reality might be the official mark of Sweeney’s arrival.

Dressed in an oversized pale green jumper and seated in what looks like the peaked attic of her home, Sweeney seems relaxed, even in the eye of the metaphorical storm. Beyond the reviews, she’s grateful for something more pressing: the fact that she’s been able to spend the day running personal errands on a rare stop at home in Los Angeles. “This whole year is starting to become a blur to me,” she says over Zoom. “I’ve been living out of a suitcase for basically the last two years. Home’s been wherever I am.”

Recently, home for Sydney was, well, Sydney. Between February and April this year, she was a fixture around town filming the upcoming romantic-comedy Anyone But You from director Will Gluck, alongside Top Gun: Maverick’s Glen Powell and local stars Bryan Brown and Rachel Griffiths. Given how much she was snapped enjoying the sites (from Luna Park to Swans games), you might not be surprised to learn that Sweeney loves Australia.

“It was honestly so much fun,” she says. “I miss the people. I miss waking up on the water. The fruit was all fresh! I feel like you guys have figured out life, the balance of work and pleasure. Everyone just has such a good vibe about themselves. I would move to Australia if I could.”

She’s sweet-talking me like I’m the owner of Australia or something, the Willy Wonka of working visas. But she recalls her time here so fondly that she won’t give up any details. “I was staying right on the beach. An amazing place, unbelievable. I’ve never been in anything like it before,” she says.

Sweeney with Anyone But You director Will Gluck and Dermot Mulroney at a Sydney Swans match.Credit: Instagram

Bondi? Bronte? Where are we talking about here? “I don’t want to give it up!” Sweeney laughs. “Because if I come back that is where I’m staying, and I want to protect it because no one found me. It was a dream.”

Being unfindable is an understandable wish, because Sweeney’s time working on Anyone But You aroused global headlines and frenzied internet attention. I’m not sure if she noticed, I joke. Sweeney rolls her eyes comically.

The nexus of the attention was awkward, focused on public speculation that she and her co-star Powell - both, at that point, separately betrothed (Sweeney is engaged to restaurateur Jonathan Davino) - had an on-set affair to rival that of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s on Mr & Mrs Smith. Considering she’s new to this level of Hollywood scrutiny, how does she see the whole episode: can she view it with a certain humour, or does the speculation around her private life feel invasive?

“I mean, it’s honestly… we filmed a romantic comedy!” Sweeney says with exasperation. “So, of course, people see what they want to see. But really, they saw us on set. All those pictures are of us in character, so of course that’s what we’re gonna do.” But the fact that, from the pictures, people surmised they’d had an affair? “I think, you know, it just proves that we’re great actors,” Sweeney jokes.

If nothing else, the whole saga indicates a supersizing of Sweeney’s celebrity. After Emmy-nominated roles in Euphoria and The White Lotus, she’s already a generational icon of sorts. I can imagine Hollywood casting directors already issuing requests for “a Sydney Sweeney type”, a pin-up with a complex interiority. Her upcoming roles, Reality included, are a grab-bag spanning blockbuster tentpoles (Marvel’s Madame Web, where Sweeney will play Spider-Woman), high-profile dramas (Apple’s Echo Valley alongside Julianne Moore) and indie projects (Immaculate, which she also produced). In a canny bit of casting, she’s even signed on to reprise Jane Fonda’s bombshell Barbarella in an upcoming remake.

“I became an actress because I wanted to play as many characters as possible. That’s what’s fun about acting, being able to be somebody other than yourself… and other than the last character you played,” Sweeney says. “When I look for projects, I try to find ones that excite me and challenge me and ones that differ from others I’ve been in. Reality was so much fun because she was so different from Cassie [Euphoria], and Anyone But You was so different from The White Lotus. It’s fun finding those different waves to ride.”

Sweeney and Glen Powell pitching Anyone But You at CinemaCon 2023 in April.Credit: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

I first recall seeing Sweeney in Everything Sucks!, the barely seen ’90s-set Netflix coming-of-age series that was canned after just one season, where she played a bitchy drama student with such a warm vulnerability that it grabbed your sympathy by surprise. When she popped up on A Handmaid’s Tale just weeks later, playing a young wife ensnared in patriarchal obedience, it was discombobulating, like “Wait, is that her?”

Her performances in Euphoria and the Amazon erotic-thriller The Voyeurs have also shown Sweeney to be an actor unafraid to “go there”, those places of extreme onscreen vulnerability. Michael Mohan, who directed Sweeney in Everything Sucks! and The Voyeurs, and who will re-team with the actress in Immaculate, calls her process “a magic trick”.

Sweeney as Cassie in Euphoria.

“You know what’s miraculous? Going to those dark places, it’s so easy for her,” he said about working with Sweeney on The Voyeurs. “Literally, through some of those scenes, she had to maintain a pretty heightened pitch, where she’s doing a snotty-cry but she has to do it in five different locations, which means that on five different days she had to go to that place. And what she would do is she’d go off by herself, and suddenly we’d just hear her scream, and we’d be like, ‘OK, roll camera, right now!’, and just run in there. I honestly don’t know how she does it. I just stay out of the way.”

Sweeney laughs about her fascination with her characters’ psychic complexities. “I think I’ve always been like that. I’ve always been pretty much a go-getter,” she says. “I just look at myself as a vessel for my characters so I want to go to those vulnerable or dark or crazy sides for them, because that’s my job. I just put myself in my characters’ shoes and I tell their stories. Whether they’re good or bad or funny or scary, I’m telling their stories.”

Telling Winner’s story was a unique opportunity for Sweeney. She’d never played a real person before, but it jibed with her love of intense character-building. Considering the film’s script is taken verbatim from an FBI transcript, lending it a tense tone that dips into surreal humour, it fell on Sweeney to find the emotional beats in what’s essentially an official document.

Sweeney at a premiere of Reality at MoMA in New York last month.Credit: Andy Kropa/Invision/AP

Although there’s endless material online about Winner’s story, not to mention commentary from across the political divide - a veritable wormhole for viewers to fall into after the movie - Sweeney avoided it all. “I actually stayed away from anything the internet gave me because what I loved about this movie was there was no agenda to it,” she says.

“We weren’t putting a headline or political lens on Reality’s experience, it was just showing a moment in her life that happened, and so I didn’t want to have a preconceived notion of who she was. I wanted to just learn from her who she was, and get inside her mind and tell her story without inputting my own judgement.”

She Zoomed with Winner for a few hours and texted her throughout the film’s rehearsals and shoot. “I kind of got to know her as a person. And I tried to dive as deep as I could into her psyche, because there’s so many layers to her.”

So, what is she like? “She’s really funny,” says Sweeney. “She has quite a sense of humour, which I wasn’t expecting. Once I did learn that, working back and reading the transcript, I picked up on so many places that she was trying to use her humour in the situation, which was interesting. But the situation itself, it’s very complex. She has a lot of emotions towards it because it’s such a triggering memory for her, but she and her family are very glad that her story is being told and more people are becoming aware of her situation.”

Reality screens at the Sydney Film Festival on June 17, and opens in cinemas nationally on June 29.

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.