Transcription
I think what is happening here is she's like, I can make more money selling my bath water. It's sad to me that she's resigning herself to that fate, but I kind of think she already did a long time ago and was like, I'm not going to have a long career in Hollywood. Like, this is the path that she has chosen to go down, and it's one that's not going to lead to a good place for her.
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Sydney Sweeney just had one of the worst box office weekends of all time. Her new movie Christy about a female boxer made barely over a million dollars opening weekend, making it one of the worst performing films ever. Like, ever. This disastrous flop comes on the heels of yet another culture war controversy that she was at the center of. This time stemming from a viral GQ interview where, depending on which side of Twitter you were on, the interviewer was either lobbing softballs at her the whole time or orchestrating some cancellation hit piece. The whole controversy resulted in a bunch of tech billionaires turning Cat Stoofl, the GQ writer who performed the interview, into a meme, as some sort of commentary on wokeness, which we'll get into.
Amidst all of this, news broke that Sydney Sweeney is also locked in a bitter feud with Zenaia, her co-star in Euphoria, the HBO show that arguably skyrocketed her to stardom, and it's affecting her ability to do press for the show. I think Sydney Sweeney is so interesting because she's become this avatar for the right-wing internet. And I think she's sort of tried to lean into right-wing politics and benefit from that side of the internet while still also always trying to maintain plausible deniability. But as the far right seizes more and more power, I think it's becoming impossible to uphold that plausible deniability. All of this begs the question, can Sydney Sweeney survive the 2025 internet? Or has she flown too close to the sun? And are we witnessing the beginning of the downfall of Sydney Sweeney?
To discuss all of this, I have Cat Tunbarge, an amazing online culture journalist and author of the newsletter Spitfire News. Cat, welcome.
Thanks so much for having me. Okay, so I want to do one thing before we start because every time we collab, I get so many comments about [laughter] You already know what I'm going to say, vocal fry. I just want people to know that maybe I have some vocal fry, maybe Cat has some vocal fry, but we don't want to hear your comments about it. Just either listen and shut up or deal with it. Sorry, this is my voice. This is her voice. I don't want to see thousands of comments again. I want you to listen to the words that are coming out of our mouth.
Couldn't have said it better myself. I think apart from like maybe like a few edge cases like people who have maybe like misophonia, I think most people are just being dramatic. Also, who cares? I don't have vocal fry. I actually know that I don't, 'cause I had to go to like speech lessons or whatever to do some audio recording stuff around my book. But yeah, it just doesn't bother me. So, if it bothers you, too bad. We're here to talk about Sydney Sweeney, okay? We have important business to get to. And we don't have time, you know, for this sort of thing.
So, for people that haven't sort of like kept up with the discourse, I feel like let's do a quick rundown of kind of Sydney Sweeney's career and how she became this sort of like overtly political figure. So, when did Sydney Sweeney first come onto your radar? How would you say her career began?
I would say it was 100% Euphoria. And like, I heard her name in association with Euphoria before I even could recognize who she was because I really never watched it. I saw her for the first time on The White Lotus and it was around that time period that I think she really popped off and became more of like a household name.
Yeah, I was looking into her career and she had all these minor parts actually on a bunch of like old-timey TV shows like 90210, Grey's Anatomy, Pretty Little Liars, but I agree she didn't really become a big thing until I would say The Handmaid's Tale and Euphoria. So, she plays Eden, this like pious young wife in The Handmaid's Tale. And then from 2019 on, she's played Cassie on Euphoria, who's which really I think transformed her into like a mainstream name. White Lotus. In 2021, she played Olivia Mosbacher. This earned her an Emmy nomination. A lot of people thought that that character was meant to be a parody of Dasha from Red Scare. So, I feel like even back then, we were talking about her in the same context of like conservative politics.
By 2022, she was starring in ad campaigns for Armani Beauty, Miumu, and she seemed to just like have this really hot like viral fame. She started like getting cast in romcom roles. Then the controversies start. [laughter] The first one, I don't know if you remember this, was from 2022. There were photos from her mother's 60th birthday party where they had guests wearing these kind of like MAGA red style hats that said "Make 60 Great Again." Obviously like parodies of Trump hats. And I guess someone had a Blue Lives Matter shirt on. God forbid. Sydney Sweeney publicly said the celebration was just innocent. She told people to stop making assumptions. But I feel like the seed was planted.
Yes, I remember this vividly. Like, when I saw these photos going viral and the whole birthday party story, I figured it could go either one of two pathways because I think there is a little bit of room for like your weird uncle to show up to this party that's kind of mocking Trump wearing a Blue Lives Matter shirt, but also especially with knowing what we know now. It showed the type of family she grew up in and the type of culture that she was comfortable around. And then of course things just started to continue to trickle out. I feel like she gave this sort of like, "Haha, it's not that deep" thing and it's, in a sense, it's not that deep. I mean, I went to a fellow political journalist's wedding, I don't want to name, but I think they had like "Make and had their surname great again" or something. This was back in like 2018, but these parody MAGA hats like are a thing and they're a thing even in like liberal and leftist spaces. So, I don't think that, like you said, it was inherently like crazy. And we all have crazy family members that have like probably lots of different political beliefs. And like, I didn't think it was that controversial at the time either. It seemed like the type of controversy that could have only happened, frankly, in 2022 or even 2021 or 2020. Like, at this point today, that wouldn't even be a controversy.
But then you started to see this conversation about her body and sort of her looks. So throughout 2023, her star rises, she gets cast in more roles. She becomes this kind of like bombshell Hollywood actress and that leads her to hosting SNL in early March 2024. Of course, this is like that iconic I guess like screen grab where like her boobs are really on display and there was this obsession with her cleavage and her joke. I think her monologue or at least one of the jokes was actually about her cleavage. I think it was supposed to be about sort of like maybe poking fun at the way the media covered her but also like very much leaning into it.
This led pretty much the entire media to declare that she was the death of woke. An article in the Guardian at the time noted that right-wingers had declared "wokeness is dead" in relation to her hosting SNL. Richard Hanania, well-known far-right eugenicist, posted her with the caption, "Wokeness is dead." And basically, she very quickly became this symbol in the far right's like anti-woke narrative. I mean, at this time, as her image was starting to be co-opted by the right, I honestly thought that they probably had it wrong. Like, I did not peg her for a conservative, even at this point. Honestly, I I just assumed she was liberal, even if not like outwardly so, just like a lot of her peers, the type of show that she was on, the type of culture that she seemed to associate herself with, and also just like the overt sexualization that she engaged in to me. And at this point, it no longer surprises me, but I still feel like I had a little bit of like a naive sense of like, oh, I don't think she would lean into this like conservatism because it goes against like the selling point that she has used thus far in her career.
And of course, within months, I feel like it all just became even more of it. First of all, Sydney Sweeney started to commodify herself in such a crazy like late capitalist way. Like, this is the woman who was suddenly shilling for every single brand under the sun. Her Dr. Sasquatch ads also went viral where she's like, she's very much leaning into this like commentary about her body but at the same time trying, like you mentioned, to kind of like shy away from it, not be too overt. Then comes the American Eagle ad and this ad I feel like just completely shattered any sense that like she wasn't aware of what she was doing. The ad is a recreation of a really famous ad from the 1980s that featured Brooke Shields. She sort of recreates it in her own way, talking about how, well, she has really good jeans. The tagline is "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans." And as everyone pointed out, there was like various white supremacist weird eugenics sort of undertones to the whole thing. This exploded online before she could even like issue a statement, people had already dug up her Florida voter registration status and found out that just a couple months earlier, she had registered as a Republican in 2024. So, I just want to point that out, too, 'cause I think I saw some people saying, "Oh, well, it could have been back in like 2010." No, she registered on June 14th, 2024. So, I feel like this was almost a mask off moment, but even so, she kind of still demurred and like didn't respond directly.
Yes. And as specifically her voter registration info came out, I almost couldn't believe it because I was like, why would she think that this would be a successful pivot in her career at this point in time? Like, from the beginning, I was just like, I almost find this hard to believe. And I was expecting her to make some sort of statement and she just didn't. Like, it became clear that she wasn't disputing the voter registration info 'cause I honestly was like, is this even true? It it was like blowing up on Twitter, but as we all know, like fake stuff about celebrities goes viral all the time. But as the days went on and her team said nothing to dispute it, I was like, "Okay, I guess she really is a mask off Republican." And that was kind of wild to me.
Well, around the same time, too, is when she starts dating Scooter Braun. Scooter Braun co-hosts her birthday party. Her birthday party had a bunch of weird right-wing figures there, like like these sort of manosphere podcasters. Lex Fridman, I think Andrew Huberman might have been there. It was just this strange group. A bunch of like tech billionaire type people showed up. I mean, a lot of people, I guess, in Scooter Braun's broader orbit. And Scooter Braun himself has become, especially with all of the Israel stuff, a lot more right-wing and a lot more willing to sort of cater to right-wing politics. So, I feel like, yeah, you're right that she's sort of going more and more mask off, but still not overtly. So, I feel like we're all waiting for her to comment on this and waiting for a journalist to like get a hold of her and get a real response on the record.
And this kind of all happens this month in this GQ interview. So, GQ has their Man of the Year issue. They're doing all these interviews for it. Sydney Sweeney, of course, has this big movie out and she sits down with Cat Stoofl. So for people that don't know, Cat Stoflel is actually kind of a well-known journalist. She's been in the entertainment world for years. She was at like BuzzFeed. I think she was at Bustle before that. She's very well known in like culture and entertainment spaces. And she's very like well-respected. Like, she's very smart. She's very well-read. She's not just like some ditzy like girl that showed up yesterday. Like, she's thoughtful. And if you watch the full interview, I do think that she does a good job kind of questioning her. And I just want to say all that about Cat Stol because in the wake of this interview, she's become a meme. And I think it was such a Rorschach test of like how you view the internet, like how you consumed this interview. Almost no one watched the full interview on GQ's YouTube channel. Instead, they consumed it primarily through these Twitter clips. And there were two main clips going viral. One is where it appears like Cat's giving her some softball interview where she asks Sydney Sweeney about the jeans stuff. Sydney Sweeney kind of is like, "What? I did a jeans ad." And then Cat's like, "Exactly, like jeans are uncontroversial." And then the clip cuts there.
And then other people, once that went viral and people were like, "Oh, what is this softball bullshit?" These other clips started going viral where you actually see Cat press Sydney and say, you know, like, "Does it look like you have a political career, but you've been swept up in politics? Like, has that surprised you?" She asks what it was like when the president and all of these powerful people came to defend her and essentially gives her this opportunity to like disavow white supremacy, which of course Sydney Sweeney doesn't take. And so then that section of the interview became kind of weaponized and leveraged by far-right actors and all these tech billionaires on Twitter as like positioning Cat as some like woke scold journalist that's trying to like take down innocent Sydney Sweeney when in reality, this whole interview was just sort of like a bog-standard good journalistic celebrity interview in my opinion.
I agree and I think that the reaction to this was pretty unfair. For starters, I think that like in a lot of celebrity interviews today, which like are often conducted increasingly by influencers who don't ask any hard questions at all and are not journalistic whatsoever and are basically just creating a slightly elevated version of Spawn Con. Like, there are so many ways in which she didn't have to press Sydney Sweeney on this issue at all and none of us would have ever heard about it, but she did, and she did ask follow-up questions. And I think that her approach has also been somewhat misconstrued because people are like, "She's totally agreeing with Sydney. Like, she is purposefully making this easy for her." When when you watch the full interview, she's very clearly not doing that. Like, Sydney Sweeney's actually becoming uncomfortable because she doesn't drop the subject. And throughout the first part of the interview, when they're talking about the movie, when they're talking about being a celebrity, being famous, Sydney is giving these really canned PR, "I'm giving you absolutely nothing" answers. And so, the way that Cat works with that is she asks questions and she leads into questions in a way that sort of catches Sydney off guard. And I just feel like there is kind of a lack of media literacy in how people are examining this interview and treating it like it's like a softball interview, like it's bad journalism because I wouldn't go that far. You could think to yourself, "I would have asked these questions in a different way," or yada yada, but I don't think that in any sense she's a bad journalist.
And how ironic that the right-wing like billionaire coalition is trying to frame her as like almost the opposite of what this criticism is, but also in an exaggerated way. They're like, "She's an evil interviewer." I think like for you and I that actually have experience sitting down these interviews too, like we probably have a lot of context. I think the way that most people seem to consume celebrity interviews is actually through press junkets, which are ironically even more promotional. So, I think like some of the people that I saw being like, "Wow, what a takedown. Why is she pressing her like this?" It's like, "That's nothing. That's not even an antagonistic interview." And it's very hard to do an antagonistic interview, especially as a woman. Like, I guarantee you if Cat had pressed her harder or doubled down at all or done even more than she did in this interview, the backlash to her would have been 10 times worse because people would have been like, "You're bullying her. Why are journalists so mean to these celebrities? Like, poor Sydney Sweeney. Like, can a woman catch a break?" And so I thought that like actually her sort of like saying like, "Oh, jeans like they should be so controversial or whatever," and like trying to have these moments of building trust, like you said before, asking the tough questions, like not only is that a really smart journalistic tactic, but it's sort of buffering, like, you know, potential like this negativity that she might have gotten had she just done this super like negative and antagonistic interview. And let's not forget, by the way, this is for GQ. This is like she's being shot for the magazine. There's all of those intricacies at play, too. Like, it's very different when you are reporting critically on someone and you're doing a piece that doesn't rely on access and you're essentially just doing the interview to go along with this like planned photo shoot.
This isn't the first time that we have seen a like a woman journalist giving a perfectly normal interview that is in a public setting or recorded and disseminated online and then people like pick that apart and try to make the woman journalist look bad. And I think this is like a very gendered practice because male interviewers, like men who are doing these types of interviews, are often like praised to sometimes an absurd extent just for doing their jobs. And in contrast, as a woman journalist in particular, you can never do it right. Like, people will never be satisfied with your performance.
I think you're so right, Cat, that just like women journalists' performances are generally picked apart non-stop. But I think also what was so depressing to me was the attacks on her appearance. Like, here's a woman that's showing up to do her job. She's not a Hollywood starlet, okay? She doesn't have a makeup and hair team and, you know, she's just going to do her job as a writer. She looks great. I don't know if she's in her 30s or 40s or whatever, but, you know, she looks good for however old she is. She's like a normal professional working woman. But you very quickly saw these attacks of just like, "Here's what the woke liberal left wants is this woman who is, you know, above the age of 30 and isn't wearing enough makeup and isn't dressing sexy enough or whatever." And had she tried to adhere more to those beauty standards and gotten dressed up, I think she would have also been chastised, especially just given the controversy around Sydney Sweeney and like the whole eugenics combo, too.
I thought it was so gross how a lot of these people were focusing on her like phenology. I just want to read you a tweet. Lulu Changeng Bervi, who's a really famous PR consultant for a lot of big-time Silicon Valley people, quote-tweeted Paul Graham, who is the founder of Y Combinator, who tweeted an image of Cat Stoflal saying, "Perfidious physiognomy. I'm dyslexic, I'm definitely mispronouncing that. Never open up to someone who looks at you like this." And then it's a bunch of really racist people below essentially like dissecting her physical attributes. And Paul Graham, the person she quote-tweeted, tweeted a photo of Cat and said, "The eyebrow equivalent of uptalking. This is the face people use when they don't want to take responsibility for what they're saying." And it's just like a face. She just looks completely normal. Like, she actually looks great. Her hair looks good. She looks pretty. But it's just this like rank misogyny that you saw from the jump hitting this older, I guess like brown-haired, brunette, short-haired woman against like this blonde, young, you know, beautiful mega superstar. This to me fits into what we now have as like a library of examples of just like unhinged, so misogynistic to just an abs an extreme and absurd level, like reaction coming from this community. It reminds me of the famous like TikTok of those women in the office where the camera is spinning around and they're all doing that dance and the reaction on Twitter was literally like, "This is why women shouldn't be allowed in the workplace."
You're talking about the one where it's like Gen Z boss in a mini or like >> Yes. Yes. And this like spiraled into like, "This is why like literally like women ruined the workplace," which is just like it is bizarre, truly, that these are the building blocks of like right-wing political theory today. But it's also so easy to pull apart because it's not true and it just at its core is is only misogyny.
What I thought was so crazy, too, is how intertwined the tech billionaire landscape is with far-right internet politics. Obviously, Mark Zuckerberg has been pilled for a while. Silicon Valley has been fascist for a minute now. But what struck me was how quickly they turned Cat Stofl into a meme and leveraged this interview to the point that billionaire Mark Zuckerberg literally made Sydney Sweeney his cover photo on Twitter. This is a 65-year-old like billionaire like weird old bald man that like should just be sitting back and investing in his like weapons startup, but for whatever reason, he's sitting on Twitter tweeting pictures of Cat Stoof 24/7 to like fight with the Pope for some reason. It was just so crazy. And like, I mean, I mentioned Paul Graham from Y Combinator, but also just seemed like all of tech Twitter, who, just to be clear, tech Twitter loves engaging in all forms of misogyny, but they hopped on this so quickly. Whereas like I think previously they would dismiss this type of stuff as like, "Oh, women's news, celebrity drama, gossip." But because it can be turned into this like sort of culture war like Rorschach test, they just like leaned into it so hard in a way that I haven't seen them do before.
I agree and I feel like it's a really good example of just the fact that they have been stewing in this like 4chan level of discourse so much and it is hard to grapple with because it's these largely men who have so much money, so much power. They hoard and command so many of the world's resources. And it is dystopian that what they are doing with all of that power is they are making this type of internet content and using that as their proxy with which to engage with the world. It is like creepy and terrifying and also ridiculous and like would be laughable if it wasn't so serious.
I also think like the idea that Sydney Sweeney was being neutral in this interview is also something that should be debunked because I think you're like watching this dance happen, right? Like with every interview, but like you see Cat kind of like working her and like, you know, buttering her up, asking the tougher questions, following up, trying to make sure she's comfortable enough to answer questions, but not like just sitting around and giving her some puff piece. And you saw these people like, "Oh, this interviewer kept trying to implicate her in something she had nothing to do with." People's opinions about her online. She actually has a lot to do with people's opinions about her online. But also like you see her body language in this interview and her dismissive answers. And you know, for instance, when she's asked about Trump tweeting about her and all these powerful people in government sort of like siding with her on the internet every day, she's just like, "It's surreal." And even just like the voice that she does, like she leans into this stereotype of this like silly like airhead blonde woman that like is just, you know, hot and known for her boobs. And like that's her right to do that, of course. But I do think that there's something to be said about her body language and her responses during this interview because I don't think she was exactly opening up or operating in super good faith either. I think she could tell that she was being asked questions that she probably didn't want to answer and responded in a more caged way.
I mean, this is one of the things I found so interesting about Cat's interviewing style is like one of the ways that she tried to get around this was she framed it to Sydney Sweeney as like, "So, when Trump tweeted about you, if I were in that position, there would be a part of me that would feel supported by these really powerful people. Is that how you felt?" And that clearly really caught Sydney off guard because of the canned way she had been responding to all of these questions. So, she had to really like come up with how she was going to respond to this on the spot. And the way that she did was she claimed that like she basically didn't follow any of it because she was filming Euphoria. And she just kept repeating over and over again like, "I don't go on my phone. I don't check my phone. I don't take my phone to work. I just come straight home from work and go to bed." 100% guarantee that is not true. She is intentionally like hiding how she really feels about this situation in a way where she's not even doing the bare minimum of condemning white supremacy.
Exactly. And I mean, I think also this other tweet by Lulu about this that was engaged very heavily with tech Twitter, it got hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of likes. She says, "Compare the subject's neutral, half-lidded gaze filled with bored detachment and a hint of disdain versus the interviewer's searing smile and weeding tone, evoking an unctuous toad hiding a knife behind his back. It's a total aesthetic victory." Okay, once again, first of all, enough with the vocabulary words. I [laughter] am too dyslexic for this. I don't even know what this says, but I think framing this as a total aesthetic victory just goes back to this idea of like it's about like misogyny and like the fact that Sydney Sweeney is young and blonde and beautiful and Cat is also beautiful in my opinion, but she is an older brunette with, you know, with short hair and they can sort of like frame her as this like haggard, you know, woman that's like coming here to attack this like blonde starlet that's become their avatar.
Yes. It's also like a demonization of women who who work and women who are in any sort of like power or leadership position. And of course, these people grant journalists an absurd amount of power in their minds. And they hate journalists and especially women journalists with a burning passion. They also hate women teachers. They hate women nurses. They hate women HR people. And they talk about all of these women in these professional capacities in this way where they're like, "These women are evil." Basically, like it's like they create this caricature. And the reason why they love Sydney has absolutely nothing to do with her work or who she is as an actress. It is also again, they are reducing her to being blonde and having big boobs and she's decided that she's going to ride that wave for as long as she can. And ironically, she doesn't look like that in this movie. Not at all. She plays this, you know, female boxer where she had to gain a significant amount of weight. Her hair looks completely different. I mean, she's almost unrecognizable. And I wonder if that's part of it, too, is that like, you know, she performs well in these romcoms where she can kind of lean into this like blonde, ditzy, light-hearted image, but when she has to do this more serious acting role, it's just like not landing. Like, I don't think she's cultivated a fandom of people that really view her seriously. And so, that just makes me wonder of like, okay, where is her career going? Because it seems like she's sort of screwed herself a little bit.
Yes. And I find this so fascinating because at the end of the day, what shocks me about what Sydney Sweeney is doing is not that like a white actress is a Republican. At the end of the day, I never had any expectation that I knew this woman or that she would be liberal or let alone progressive deep down. What is surprising me is sort of like what this implies about the business model that she's embracing. And I think what it shows there is a capitalist component here where she's talked about this, like Sydney Sweeney has talked about how much of what she does is a money calculation. How can she maximize the most money at this point in her career under the assumption that at some point her career will expire. And I think that's sad for a number of reasons. But this exactly, like you see the calculus on display with this movie Christy because she's playing like this is a prestige role. At the beginning of the Cat interview, she's like, "Oh, this is getting festival buzz." It is not a role for broader consumption. I think that they could have made this movie more of a success, but it was not. And like the character who she's playing is a bodybuilder, a lesbian, I believe, and someone who experiences domestic violence. And that's what this movie is about. And it's based on a true story. And Sydney Sweeney is not trying to really sell that at all.
I think what is happening here is she's like, I can make more money selling my bath water and I can make more money appealing to this incredibly sexist, misogynistic culture that ultimately hates and despises me and will literally it cannot wait to throw me away the second I turn 35 years old or like the second like some other beauty style comes into vogue. And so it's just like it's sad to me that she's resigning herself to that fate. But I kind of think she already did a long time ago and was like, I'm not going to have a long career in Hollywood. Like, frankly, like even other actresses, this is the path that she has chosen to go down and it's one that's not going to lead to a good place for her.
Which is so interesting to sort of contrast her and Zenaia, the of course like her co-star in Euphoria who's also just become this like global superstar phenomenon and I would say arguably significantly bigger star than Sydney Sweeney and like somebody like Zenaia, like who she's allegedly in a bitter feud with over politics according to the Daily Mail and who knows how much truth there is, but Zendaya does seem to have more progressive politics compared to Sydney. Zendaya is of course also beautiful, but she's not white and blonde. And so she's always seen as like, you know, something different, I think, in the eyes of these like conservative internet figures where they view her as like woke, right? And they view her as this sort of like avatar for wokeness, but in a sense that sort of like gives her more staying power.
And one thing that I've been thinking about a lot with Sydney Sweeney is I've been thinking about her breakout role in Euphoria, what went viral from that, the way that Sam Levinson, the director, like shot her and sort of his work in general because his work has come under criticism a lot for being incredibly sexually explicit and just incredibly objectifying of of women. And Sydney Sweeney is the epitome of that. The clips of her that are sexually explicit in Euphoria are so viral. They are so widely viewed and they ultimately I think created this impression on the right of like, she is the perfect woman because she is sexy because I can see her naked for free and because like that's why they want to embrace her. And of course, there's an expiration date on that. But I also think about how Sam Levinson directed Lily Rose Depp like this in the show The Idol and Lily Rose Depp was really able to break away from that and she was able to really transcend through other roles that like kind of showed off her dexterity as an actress. Like the divergence in their paths is fascinating to me.
Well, Sydney Sweeney also like leans into this like dumb aloofness kind of. And I feel like I mean, even if you think of her character from White Lotus, which I feel like she really kind of embodies sometimes, like she uses those drawn-out words, you know, when she talks sometimes and like she always has the the, you know, like the eyes at half-mast where like I don't know, there was that viral tweet a while ago that was just like, "Men like her because they think that she looks stupid." And I do think that she sort of like plays up this like anti-intellectualism, maybe. I think maybe if the goal is to make as much money as possible, good luck. Maybe she'll run off into the sunset with Scooter Braun, god forbid. But I do think that like she's putting a cap on her career. Like you said, she's really leaning hard into commodifying herself as hard as she can for as long as she can, you know, while she's still young.
But I think the last thing that I want to talk about just in relation to all of this is just the disparity between what the right-wing internet says is successful versus like what's actually culturally successful. And I thought Ryan Brick made such a good point in his newsletter today where he wrote, "Sweeny's box office bomb and refusal to address her new white nationalist fans feels even more notable when you place it next to the huge debut of Predator: Badlands this weekend, which critic Richard Lawson succinctly summed up as quote, 'This Predator is queer, and we should say it.' A take that has not been well-received on X." All of this is to say that the right wants to be the prism through which you can understand what is and isn't popular. But they're often wrong. And if say you were someone that they were circling like Sydney Sweeney, hypothetically, and again, hypothetically, you didn't like that, you could very easily ignore them or tell them to off, which Sydney Sweeney has not done for some reason.
I thought that that point was so well made where like if you just sat and consumed Fox News all day, you would probably think that like Sydney Sweeney was the biggest actress in the world and like the most successful person ever, but she's like actually really struggled. And aside from these like corny ads that she's done, like I don't know. This movie was just such a flop at the box office. It's hard to see how her career really elevates past it. And I think that there is something kind of like sad encapsulated within that because in a better world that was not shaped by these conservative freaks who think women expire at age 29, there would be more opportunities for an actress like Sydney Sweeney.
I just think it is so ultimately self-defeating for Sydney Sweeney to decide to take this path. And my like initial response to seeing how bad Christy flopped at the box office was I was like, this is yet another cautionary tale for women who choose to try to reach a conservative audience. And it's the cautionary tale because so much of like conservative influencing is like, "We failed in Hollywood, so we had to make it in in conservative influencer world." So that a lot of them are failed Hollywood stories. And also like I think about other actresses who have tried to go anti-woke, like Gina Carano, and it's just like this doesn't work. "Go woke, go broke" is not true and has never been true. And no matter how often they say it, it's it's actually the opposite. Like time and time again, even in these bad cultural periods, like the people who are winning Hollywood are not like the out-and-proud conservatives or the people who do this weird in-between thing that Sydney Sweeney is doing. And it sucks that women always sort of end up at the center of all of it because men are not made to make these decisions. Someone like Glenn Powell, I would say, has leaned into this like all-American guy look, you know, and he's like, I don't know, people call him like the next Tom Cruise or whatever. Like there there is this brand of conservative that like loves Glenn Powell. But I mean, in some ways, he's not like baiting them in the same way as Sydney Sweeney. And of course, men are not like objectified in the same ways as women, but they're also just not forced to make those choices in the same way.
100%. Like Sydney Sweeney is making these choices because they've been presented to her. Like, which way? >> Which way, white girl? And I I do think like it says something sad. But I also think that like from a capitalist perspective, it might make sense because not only did Christy flop and no one in her conservative audience is going to see this movie, but also her previous movies in like the past year or so have also been been flops.
Yeah, you're right. I mean, she doesn't have a great track record recently. Americana flopped. Christy is not doing well. Eden also, which she was in, it looks like they spent over $35 million making it. It only grossed about $2.5 million at the box office. So, she doesn't have a good track record and I wonder, you know, what sort of acting role she'll be getting going forward. And I also will never miss an opportunity to blame something on Sam Levinson, who I just think is awful and a scourge of culture. I'm like, is this partially his fault for dragging Euphoria out for so long and like keeping her sort of pigeonholed in the role of Cassie, which is what she's the most known for and the most identifiable by. But that's also such a box because the character of Cassie is so overtly sexualized to the point of almost parody. And that's just like that's not based on me watching Euphoria. That's based on seeing like what goes viral from Euphoria.
Okay. So, if Sydney Sweeney's acting role is basically dunzo because she leaned too far into this like rightward pivot or she hasn't managed the culture war correctly, where do you see her in like 5 or 10 years?
That is such a good question and I could see her kind of falling out of public favor for a bit and then having like a Ryan Murphy elder actress revival like many years down the road. I saw someone making this comparison to Jessica Lange earlier today. And so that was interesting to me 'cause I was like, I could see that happening down the road for her. We have to rely on Ryan Murphy to like resurrect her. Ryan Murphy if he's still making horrible shows or like maybe some other like really campy director will rise to take his place. I don't know. But I think in the intermediate, I really think she's going to struggle because even like going back to Gina Carano, she is so deeply conservative that she will at least have that audience because she has that like group of people who she will constantly be like feeding, even if she can't regain mainstream popularity. But Sydney Sweeney trying to hover in between, I think that is probably like the worst move of all because she's not really even grifting off the conservative audience. She's more so riding the wave of like where this gets her in mainstream advertising and like still mainstream media, GQ like Man of the Year cover star. Like, she's still there, but I do think that like this is probably going to be the last ride for her in that position.
Well, Cat, thank you so much for joining me today to chat. I love chatting about all this stuff with you.
Oh my gosh, me too. Thank you for having me.
All right, that's it for the show. You can watch full episodes of Power User on my YouTube channel at Taylor Loren. If you like the show, please buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter, Usermag, at usermag.co. That's usermag.co or support me on Patreon, where you can get bonus episodes of Power User, monthly live streams, and more. I'll [music] be back next week with a brand new episode of Poweruser. See you then.