Sydney Sweeney stars as whistleblower Reality Winner
Before making a splash in her namesake city, US actor Sydney Sweeney was at the Berlin International Film Festival with a surprising new project.
Sydney Sweeney has been all over Sydney, NSW in recent weeks, and it’s not hard to see what all the fuss is about.
The 25-year-old actor, best known for her teenage characters in Euphoria and The White Lotus, is in town to make an “R-rated rom-com” alongside Top Gun: Maverick’s Glen Powell. Photos of Sweeney, wearing a bikini and pictured on Sydney’s Pittwater during the film shoot, have gone viral. British tabloid The Daily Mail couldn’t hide its enthusiasm, running four posts of Sweeney in quick succession and anointing her a “classic bombshell”.
Even co-star Powell seems starstruck. Responding to a post on Instagram, he added “Sydney in Sydney” with three fire emojis. Sweeney is indeed hot stuff.
She’s one of Hollywood’s fastest-rising stars and she is taking her career firmly in hand. She already has her own production company, Fifty-Fifty Films, and has just produced her first movie, Immaculate, in which she stars. She will soon play the title role in a new Barbarella movie and has already filmed her first Marvel adventure, Madame Web.
But her latest film, Reality, shows Sweeney in a surprising different light. She plays real-life whistleblower Reality Winner in a taut drama in which she is interrogated by two FBI agents. It was widely embraced by critics at its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and was picked up by HBO in the US. An Australian release date is yet to be announced.
In an interview in Berlin, Sweeney says she has always been driven to succeed.
“I was 12 when I put together a business plan presentation to my parents of what could happen if they let me audition for a movie,” she says.
She had seen the presentations her father made as a pharmaceutical sales rep. And what did her parents say?
“ ‘What?!’ They were very confused. For my entire life I told them I wanted to be an actress and they just thought it was like a little girl saying she wants to be a princess. And then this very cheesy little film came to my small town and I found out about it. So that’s when I put the presentation together to convince my parents to let me audition for the movie. And they were like, ‘Let’s just let her audition to get it out of her system. And then we’ll never have to hear about this again’.”
She got the role. “It was like an extra role,” she says of ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction.
Her parents came on board, regularly driving her from their home outside Spokane, Washington to Los Angeles for auditions, until the family moved there when she was 13.
The case of Reality Winner, a former member of the US Air Force and a National Security Agency translator who speaks the Iranian languages Farsi, Dari and Pashto, is extraordinary. On June 3, 2017, when the film is set, she was arrested on suspicion of leaking an NSA report about Russian interference in the 2016 US elections to news website The Intercept.
Winner had been spurred into action after then president Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey in May. Ultimately, she was sentenced under the 1917 Espionage Act (passed two months after the US entered World War I) to spend five years and three months in a federal prison, the longest sentence ever imposed for the unauthorised release of government information to the media.
Director Tina Satter based the film on her 2019 play, Is This a Room, in turn based on the interrogation transcript. She says Winner is “out of prison, but she’s still not fully free. My sense is it’s a very day-by-day thing”. Winner’s parents have been supportive throughout and attended the film’s Berlin premiere. Sweeney was able to speak to Winner on many occasions.
“Tina connected us and I started texting her and then we started Zooming,” Sweeney recalls. “I want to keep our conversations private, of course, because it’s very personal to her. But I learned as much as I could about her to be able to do her justice.”
What was her impression of Winner? “She’s so funny. I couldn’t believe it. Then when I re-read the transcript after speaking to her, I saw more of her in it. I realised this is her humour, this is where she was trying to be a little more lighthearted and make herself feel more comfortable.”
During filming, Satter was impressed by Sweeney’s performance in what is essentially a longform conversation with two manipulative male FBI agents.
“When we got to the edit, I could see the takes we had from Sydney of that emotional landscape she was building and it kind of blew my mind,” Satter says. “That’s the alchemy of an incredible actress: that intangible craft meets what Sydney can do with what is happening in that little room to make it that really tense, kind of awful, traumatic thing.”
Sweeney has a time-consuming method of creating books to help her develop her on-screen characters, and she did this with Reality.
“They are like a memory of their entire life, from the day they’re born to the first day you meet them on screen,” she says. “So it’s like a timeline of the relationships with people that she has had in her life, a diary of her entire world. It helps me really flesh out a person, because I want to make sure that whatever I’m doing for that character is truly them. I don’t want to think about something that Sydney would have experienced. So with Reality I wanted to actually be thinking how she would be thinking and about how things affect her.”
A film about a woman following her conscience and paying the price, Reality is an indictment of the US justice system. Is Sweeney involved in matters of politics and society? “I think we’re all involved,” she responds.
A straight-A student at high school, Sweeney has said she never went to parties or took drugs – unlike her characters in Euphoria and The White Lotus. She studied for a business degree to learn more about the law of contracts, although she failed to receive the credit as her professor wouldn’t allow her to take her final exam, as she was not attending classes while she was filming The Handmaid’s Tale.
In that series she played a pious, innocent girl betrothed to Max Minghella’s Commander. She went on to appear in HBO series Sharp Objects and played one of Charles Manson’s followers in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.
In her personal life, Sweeney has said that following her parents’ divorce she went through a period of wild behaviour. “I got myself into sometimes really unfortunate and even dangerous relationships,” she told C Magazine. “I never talk about it, but I have a very healthy, very steady personal life.” Wanting a relationship away from the showbiz realm, she is reportedly engaged to Chicago-based Jonathan Davino, who is in his late 30s and whose family runs a device technology and packaging company.
Her new endeavour, Fifty-Fifty Films, is part of her motivation to bring business savvy to her career.
“I loved school and I find myself thriving in an environment where I learn and I can learn from other people,” she says.
“I truly believe that movies and TV shows are a collaboration, so it’s about being able to be part of that creative discussion behind the camera.”
When we meet in Berlin, Sweeney has just returned from filming Immaculate for four months in Rome. “It’s a thriller-horror film,” she explains. “It’s about a young nun who goes to a convent in Italy, searching for more meaning in her life. But the convent that she goes to has some crazy stuff going on and it’s not what she thought it was.”
Sweeney didn’t have a religious upbringing, although her grandmother did. “She went to a very religious school, her teachers were nuns and she used to say they were very strict. So I flew her to Italy for the first time; she had never left the country and I had her be an extra and she dressed up as a nun. She’s like, ‘I’m naming myself Sister Rebecca, because she was the nun I hated the most’. It was a lot of fun.”
Any self-consciousness about her body Sweeney may have felt when she was younger appears to have vanished. She has designed a line of swimwear for Frankies Bikinis and recently told Elle magazine: “I’m in Australia now filming, and wearing my pieces almost every day. It’s the perfect place: beach, hot, sunny, and romantic!”
Sweeney is still to shoot a third season of Euphoria, and she has been cast as Julianne Moore’s wayward daughter in a thriller, Echo Valley, for Apple Original Films. Then there’s Barbarella, a remake of the Jane Fonda cult classic. I suggest the sex goddess character is as far as you can get from Reality Winner.
“It is!” she enthuses. “I’m very excited.” What does she think of Fonda’s version? “Oh, my gosh, I’m a huge fan. It was so fun. But we are in early development, there’s no script right now.”
Sweeney certainly likes to mix it up.
“I love acting, I love what I do,” she says. “I do it because I want to play all these different characters. So being able to be all these people in different formats, in different realms, is why I do it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a Marvel film, or if it’s an artsy indie.
“If I’m in love with a character or if I’m fascinated or if I’m challenged by it, then I’m going to do it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a $100m movie or not.”