The 27-year-old actress has charted an enviable career path by outworking her peers and throwing her name behind everything from blockbuster rom-coms to soap made from her own bathwater—and yes, those jeans

By Allie Jones | Photography by Elizaveta Porodina for WSJ. Magazine | Styling by Tonne Goodman

Aug. 20, 2025 8:00 am ET – Wall Street Journal

SYDNEY SWEENEY loves to work. The actress and producer loves to work so much that when she talks about how much she loves it, she gives the most believable performance of a cliché I have ever observed in an interview.

“It’s great to do what you love,” she tells me, casually tossing her golden hair over her shoulder, “because if you love it, then it doesn’t feel like work, and you want to do it every single day, all the time.”

Even our meeting, which is supposed to be fun—at a private pottery class on a bric-a-brac Los Angeles rooftop with a view of the Hollywood sign—is a kind of work. She keeps a list of activities she’d like to do in her rare time away from set, and one of them is pottery. “I try to check off one a week,” she says as we sit down at side-by-side pottery wheels, ready to learn how to make fruit bowls from a bubbly instructor named Madison. 

Sweeney, 27, is one of the most prolific stars of her generation. After breaking out on Euphoria and the first season of The White Lotus (and snagging Emmy nominations for both), she has successfully made the jump to movie star. Her 2023 rom-com Anyone But You, which she produced through her company Fifty-Fifty Films, made $220 million at the box office on a $25 million budget. She joined the Marvel universe in Madame Web, portrayed whistleblower Reality Winner in HBO’s Reality and this summer starred alongside Julianne Moore in Apple TV+’s twisty addiction thriller Echo Valley. In August, she premiered two films: Ron Howard’s true-life story of settlers in the Galápagos, Eden (don’t miss Sweeney’s terrifying birth scene), and Americana, a Tarantino-esque western co-starring Paul Walter Hauser.

And the really big stuff is yet to come: This fall, Sweeney stars in Christy, a biopic of pro boxer Christy Martin, and The Housemaid, Paul Feig’s big-screen adaptation of the bestselling thriller novel, alongside Amanda Seyfried. Sweeney says she gained about 30 pounds in muscle to portray Martin and then lost it in five weeks to show up as her usual svelte self on the set of The Housemaid.

“I loved it,” she says of the transformation process. “It’s so fun just not being yourself.” 

Sweeney is currently filming the much-anticipated third season of Euphoria in Los Angeles (all she has said is that her character, Cassie, remains “crazy”), and then she will start production on Scandalous, Colman Domingo’s directorial debut about the relationship between Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jr. She will also produce and star in a live-action adaptation of the viral videogame Split Fiction, which will be directed by Wicked’s Jon M. Chu.

In 2022, Sweeney told an interviewer that thanks to the financial demands of modern stardom and the decidedly-not-supersize salaries for streaming actresses, she could not afford to take six months off of work. Who would pay her stylist and publicist and mortgage? Since making that admission, however, her going rate has increased exponentially. She was reportedly paid just $65,000 for Reality in 2023; later that year, she earned $2 million for Anyone But You. For The Housemaid, she made $7.5 million. In two short years, she has become one of the highest-paid actresses of her generation, and she has built up an impressive roster of brand deals, selling everything from Miu Miu handbags to her own bathwater soap. If Hollywood is in crisis, she seems to be floating above it.

As we throw our clay down on our wheels, I ask if she still feels that she can’t take a break. 

“What I was talking about is more that I didn’t have time to take six months off,” she says. “I was so busy, and still, same. But I do that because I don’t want to take six months off. I get anxiety thinking about just taking a few days off.” 

She leaves some wiggle room in her schedule in case an enticing new project pops up, she says. “But if I wanted to lock everything in, I could probably be booked for the next three or four years.”

SWEENEY HAS BEEN AT THIS since she was 12. After growing up in the Pacific Northwest, she convinced her parents to move to Los Angeles, where she auditioned for years—a guest spot on Pretty Little Liars here, a Lifetime movie there—before booking her first major role on the Netflix streaming series Everything Sucks in 2018. The financial stress, she has said, led her parents to divorce and file for bankruptcy.

Versace dress and Van Cleef & Arpels necklace.

“Being on set is my happy place,” she tells me. Feig, who spent the first few months of the year in New Jersey directing Sweeney in The Housemaid, confirms as much in a phone call. “She loves to work,” he says. “She was completely present emotionally, just up for anything, and really didn’t bring any issues to set. And I know she was going through some things when this was going on—I mean, now everybody knows about her engagement falling apart and breaking off and all that.” 

In March, tabloids reported that Sweeney had called off her wedding to her longtime partner, Jonathan Davino. “But she would never bring it to the set,” Feig recalls. “I’d say, ‘Hey, are you OK?’ and she’d go, ‘I’m fine, I’m great!’ but not defensively.”

When I ask Sweeney if she is still working with Davino in a professional capacity—she co-founded her production company with him in 2020—she declines to comment. “I’m going to keep all of my personal stuff out of it,” she says firmly. 

She now aims to produce everything she stars in and to produce films where she’s just working behind the scenes, too. Simply being a hired actress on set is no longer a priority for her (or as enjoyable). 

“I definitely have a hard time sitting on set in a chair,” she says. “I just want to ask, What’s the budget? What’s our line item? Where can we make things run better?”

She is also not afraid to go to the studio and ask for more. Feig recalls a moment during production when the team was planning to cut a scene at a Broadway show to avoid paying for another pricey location. Sweeney “was very insistent” that they keep the location, he says. “She was like, ‘You know what? It’s very important to the character to see her out in this world that she hasn’t been in before.’ ” 

Lionsgate approved the budget increase at Sweeney’s request, Feig says. “And she was right. It’s a lovely sequence in the movie that would’ve felt very shortchanged without doing this.”

Sweeney says her communication style in production meetings is “pretty blunt.” 

“I’ve never understood why people try to beat around the bush and not just be direct,” she says. When I ask if she is a confident negotiator, she says yes before I can finish the question.

Sweeney’s first studio film, Sony’s Madame Web, flopped at the box office but opened doors for her to pitch her own projects. When I ask whether the role was part of a deal to get the studio to buy Anyone But You back in 2023, she smiles. “There were definitely a lot of moving parts that went along with it, but there were a lot of conversations.”

The wildly successful rom-com was Sweeney’s second time producing (after the horror film Immaculate), and she paid special attention to the marketing, which sparked a thousand rumors about her chemistry on and off set with her co-star Glen Powell. (The tabloids revived the story this spring when she showed up at Powell’s sister’s wedding in Texas shortly after the news of her broken engagement began to spread.) The film’s marketing was so successful, Sweeney reasons, because she and Powell insisted on playing games and being interactive during their press hits.

“We wanted everything to be an activity,” she says, “and then the audience and the people were the ones who created all the other narratives.”

‘I think it’s important to have a finger on the pulse of what people are saying, because everything is a conversation with the audience,’ Sweeney says. LaQuan Smith gown and Lugano earrings

HEN WE MEET, Sweeney has just returned to L.A. from a few weeks of work travel: New York for the premiere of Echo Valley and a Jimmy Fallon appearance, London for the reopening of Miu Miu’s flagship store and another Echo Valley red carpet. When I ask where she’s off to next, she tells me she’s planning to spend time with her family in Idaho on the Fourth of July. She doesn’t mention that she’s stopping by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s wedding in Venice first.

Three days after our meeting, TMZ publishes paparazzi photos of Sweeney gracefully boarding a water taxi wearing a fluttery, baby-pink-and-green halter dress (archival Elie Saab couture from spring/summer 2004, per her stylist, Molly Dickson) on her way to the billionaire couple’s welcome party at the cloister of the Madonna dell’Orto church. Photographers follow her the rest of the weekend, from the ceremony to the reception to the post-reception pajama-and-lingerie party, as she throws on a parade of custom Oscar de la Renta and Galia Lahav gowns. She takes a morning stroll around the floating city with fellow guests Tom Brady and Orlando Bloom; the tabloids foam at the mouth trying to pair her up with one of them. (A source later tells TMZ that Sweeney is “not interested in dating anyone” right now.)

In all of the photos, you can tell that Sweeney is aware of the camera. She has perfect posture, but she doesn’t smile. She is careful not to lay a hand on Bloom or Brady or anyone else. She walks slowly, with control. She is, as always, working.

When she pops up in Venice, Sweeney’s connection to the newlyweds is not immediately clear. On Getty Images, there is only one photo of her with the couple, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in 2024. But a couple of weeks before the wedding, the trades report that Amazon MGM studios bought Split Fiction, the videogame adaptation that Sweeney will executive-produce and star in. She is also said to be launching a new lingerie line that is reportedly backed by the firm Coatue, which recently received $1 billion in investment from Bezos and PC company founder Michael Dell. (She declines to comment on this.) Perhaps the wedding attendance is her way of showing up for the boss. 

Of course, when Sweeney posts a video of herself shimmying in that Elie Saab number on Instagram, some of the comments skew negative. “Oligarchs? Really? Tacky AF of you,” reads one representative missive. But Sweeney doesn’t explain or complain.

‘I’m hoping that whatever I’m doing now, 40-year-old Sydney will be proud of,’ Sweeney says. Alaïa dress and Tiffany & Co. jewelry.

A few weeks later, when an American Eagle denim campaign starring the blond-haired, blue-eyed Sweeney touts her “great genes,” an internet uproar over eugenics swiftly follows. (She won’t comment on the wedding or the ads, either.)

Sweeney, perhaps by virtue of the fact that she is both physically striking and constantly on view, has become a convenient landing place for wild projections from both the right and the left. Is she a covert Hollywood conservative hypnotizing the woke into tossing aside diversity initiatives, or is she an undercover feminist using her God-given assets to subvert the system?

The real answer, I think, is more straightforward. Sweeney gets a lot of opportunities, and she takes them. In the last year, in addition to her myriad film and TV jobs, she has done ads high and low: for Armani makeup, Kérastase shampoo, Baskin Robbins ice cream (check out the “Sweet on Sydney” menu), Miu Miu leather goods, the Samsung Galaxy 25 Edge, Bai’s Wonder Water (she is the company’s “Head of Wonder”), Hey Dude slip-on shoes, Laneige lip balm and those jeans.

Not everything lands.

As a producer, Sweeney says she can be ‘pretty blunt.’ Dolce & Gabbana dress and bra and Sideara headpiece.

At the pottery studio, she says she pays attention to the online chatter, but she doesn’t let it bother her. “I think it’s important to have a finger on the pulse of what people are saying, because everything is a conversation with the audience,” she says.

She didn’t miss, for example, the response to one of her recent entrepreneurial activities. After filming some suggestive ads for Dr. Squatch, a line of natural, handmade bath products for men, she upped the ante by collaborating with the brand on a limited-edition soap infused, she says, with her own used bathwater. 

Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss sold out in seconds, according to Dr. Squatch, and is currently asking $1,500 on the resale market.

“It was mainly the girls making comments about it, which I thought was really interesting,” she says. “They all loved the idea of Jacob Elordi’s bathwater” (a reference to a racy scene in the movie Saltburn). 

She also proudly tells me that the company was just acquired by Unilever (for $1.5 billion, I learn later, when the news breaks). Whether she has equity in Dr. Squatch or any of the other brands she represents, she declines to say. 

But you’re thinking strategically? I ask. “Yes,” she says, grinning. “Very.” 

THOUGH SHE HAS now officially made it in Hollywood, Sweeney doesn’t consider L.A. home. “I try not to be here as much as possible,” she says. She prefers to visit family in Idaho or host her friends at her $13.5 million oceanfront compound in Florida, where she has a dedicated arts-and-crafts room. She’s got the place stocked with paints, clay and many works in progress, including a dollhouse, a pirate’s wheel and “a giant mirror that my best friend, Kelley, and I are building that’s going to be covered in seashells,” she says.

She is excited, however, about her new place in Bel Air, which previously belonged to 3:10 to Yuma director Delmer Daves. Sweeney bought the mansion in 2023 and has been painstakingly renovating it ever since. “I’ve been restoring everything and collecting all of his artifacts and art and scripts,” she says. “It’s been really fun.”

Sweeney is one of the most prolific actors of her generation, thanks in part to her nonstop work ethic. Stella McCartney dress.

When I ask Sweeney—who is often styled as an Old Hollywood bombshell, a throwback to a more glamorous era—if she feels particularly connected to that part of screen history, she demurs. 

“I think I just connect to history,” she says. “I love walking into a home and you can tell a family lived here, kids ran around, they had holidays here, they threw dinner parties here.”

She also declines to say if there is anyone currently in the industry who inspires her or serves as a mentor. “I’ve always said that I look up to the older version of myself,” she says seriously. “So I’m hoping that whatever I’m doing now, 40-year-old Sydney will be proud of.”

For the moment, Sweeney is content to finish her fruit bowl. Madison tells us at the end of the class that, if we want, now’s the time to get funky with it. Without hesitation, Sweeney pushes in the sides of her bowl so that it resembles a three-petaled flower. “I’m a perfectionist,” she says, “but I like to embrace imperfections when it comes to art.”

Header video: Jimmy Liu Nyeango for WSJ. Magazine; hair, Glen Oropeza; makeup, Yumi Lee; manicure, Jin Soon Choi; set design, Milena Gorum; production, Farago Projects.