Despite starting her acting career in 2009 and having 50 acting credits to her name, mention Sydney Sweeney and fans think The White Lotus, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Euphoria. And it’s her role as Cassie Howard that prompted the actress’s recent candor about how disgusting she thinks her trolling fans can be.
In Euphoria, Cassie Howard’s sexual history is exposed when nude photos of her start circulating through her high school. In pure tone-deaf absurdity, fans took screenshots of those sex scenes and started circulating them around the internet. Then, they even went further than that. In an interview just published, she told GQ, “It got to the point where they were tagging my family. My cousins don’t need that. It’s completely disgusting and unfair. You have a character that goes through the scrutiny of being a sexualized person at school and then an audience that does the same thing.”
The actress, who hails from Spokane, Washington, landed her very first role in 2009 when the film crew for ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction rolled into Port Gamble and Sweeney begged her parents for the chance to audition. At the age of 14, she relocated with her family to Los Angeles, where she took on role after role just to build her body of work so that friends and family would stop asking her when she was going to get a real job. She’s a master of her craft and one of the best in the industry, but she still has to deal with the sexist double standards of Hollywood.
While male actors are celebrated when they strip off their clothes, women and girls are still looked at as if that’s how they had to work their way to the top. Does it bother Sweeney? When asked if it makes her want to hide herself, she told an interviewer, “Not anymore. I think it’s ridiculous. I’m an artist, I play characters. It makes me want to play characters that piss people off more.”
She would absolutely nail a role where she played the character who pissed people off in the movie. The problem she has — if it is in fact a problem — is that she’ll never be able to piss off her fans.
She has no plans to stop doing nudity. In an interview with The Guardian last year, she said, “I always look at a script and make sure that it’s not just getting thrown in there to be in there.” It’s just a sad reality that she and other actresses face and now, her trolling fans are on notice.
