Elroy Schewe
Who would dare to be the poster girl for Trump’s America in Hollywood right now? The culture wars have never been more vicious, with Leftie late-night host Jimmy Kimmel being suspended by Disney this week, sparking howls of liberal outrage, after his remarks about assassinated activist Charlie Kirk.
It is no hyperbole to say there is a battle under way for the heart and soul of showbusiness, with many voices in Tinseltown claiming they are being silenced by America’s political elite – and obliterated financially by the rising class of tech bros.
Movie studios are merging, closing and falling to dust. Even huge names synonymous with the golden age of Hollywood, such as Warner Bros and Paramount.
At this point, when every liberal voice is raised in protest, who on earth in Hollywood would be brave – or foolish – enough to represent the other side?
Step forward bombshell Sydney Sweeney. Only 28 years old and having risen to fame alongside Zendaya and Jacob Elordi in the high school TV drama series Euphoria, she seems to represent in one physically striking package – evident in her stunning Emmys appearance this week – everything Hollywood finds repugnant.
And now, as publicists ready her for a six-month campaign for the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in the boxing film Christy, comes the news that she is ‘seriously’ dating the controversial music manager Scooter Braun.
Nothing could put her more squarely on a collision course with the self-appointed rulers of popular culture, as millions of Taylor Swift fans cannot stick Braun at any price.
Swift has weaponised a business dispute with him to the point where he says that he and his children have received death threats.
And yet Sydney, who simply declines to talk about politics or her love life, has found a romantic connection with the man who many of her generation think is the Antichrist – and that’s only a slight exaggeration.
She is also – reportedly – a registered Republican voter, although again, the actress won’t say a word about it.
As for her relationship with Braun, I’m told they are genuinely a serious couple. They met at Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice in June and started dating after they returned.
Initially it was reported as a strictly casual romance, but three months in and it’s another story.
It’s thought he joined her this week while she celebrated her birthday with a getaway at Lake Powell on the Utah-Arizona border. He is 44, divorced with three children.’Sydney’s friends and family are incredibly happy that she is with someone stable who treats her with complete respect,’ says a friend.
‘With so many users in her life, her inner circle is relieved that Scooter doesn’t need anything from her, not money or fame which has been a big issue for her previous relationships.
‘They can already see how much he takes care of her.’
Perhaps this is a key point, as the story of her rise to global fame is very much that old-fashioned Hollywood fable of the girl next door who never took no for an answer and got to the top alone.
She grew up on the Washington-Idaho border, in the rural Pacific Northwest, a sporty book lover who rarely watched TV. Her mother Lisa was a defence attorney but gave up after having Sydney and her brother Trent.
Her father Steve worked in hospitality. She said: ‘My mom grew up with barely anything. She got her GED [a high school diploma equivalent] when she was 16; she worked five jobs to put herself through school; she took care of her brothers; she takes care of everyone. It’s unbelievable seeing where she came from and being able to show her this world now.’
By the time she was 12, Sydney was ‘obsessed’ with the idea of becoming an actress. In order to persuade her parents, she made a five-year business plan in a PowerPoint presentation to outline her ‘inevitable’ rise to fame. For almost two years, her family drove her to Los Angeles for unsuccessful auditions. The round trip took around 38 hours.
‘I was going to five to ten auditions a week and not getting a single callback,’ she remembers. ‘I always believed that if you have a plan B, you’re prepared to fail. No matter how hard or how long it was going to take, I was just going to keep working at it.’
Her peers at school bullied her – so badly that she says the police were called in to talk about it.
Eventually the whole family relocated to Los Angeles to let her pursue her dream. But by 2016 – with yet more unsuccessful auditions – they went bankrupt, and her parents decided to divorce.
At this point, surely, anyone else would have given up – but not Sydney Sweeney. She recalled: ‘I knew that I could never actually fail because, I mean, on a very broad scale, my family did lose everything. They did get a divorce. Whether or not that was because of coming here, it definitely was a catalyst for it. So I knew I had to succeed in some capacity so that it wasn’t for nothing.’
She says that some friends at home would ask her: ‘When are you going to stop breaking your family apart and wasting all their money and just go get a real job and have a real life?’
But driving an old Volvo which belonged to her grandparents, she kept going to auditions.
In 2018 she landed roles in the TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale and in Sharp Objects, followed by a part in the film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. Then came Euphoria – which made her globally famous – and her role as a bratty, spoiled teen in the first series of The White Lotus.
‘My parents sacrificed so much to support my dream and they lost so much during it. I just felt a responsibility to show them that it was worth it,’ she said. Was she responsible for their divorce? ‘I’ll never know,’ she said. ‘They’ll say no, or they’ll say yes, depending on what fight it is. But I’ll always feel responsible.’
Her father now lives on a ranch in Mexico where there is no internet or mobile phone coverage. ‘I know he’s proud of me, and I know he’s like “Wow! This is a crazy world!”‘ Her mother lives in the house her grandmother raised the family in, which Sydney has now bought.
Without doubt, she has leaned into her blonde bombshell looks. She didn’t care that, when playing Cassie in Euphoria, the script called for her to be topless. Indeed, she proudly remembers going to a screening with her grandparents. Their reaction? ‘Best t**s in Hollywood!’ her grandmother crowed.
And her career trajectory has gone ever upwards, with the film Anyone But You proving a huge hit after fans on TikTok remarked on her chemistry with actor Glen Powell. She had hired Powell and developed the script at a period when industry wisdom had it that the era of romcoms was over.
The director of the film, Will Gluck, said: ‘She never left set, never went to her trailer. She’s so blazingly smart and such a quick study, and she’s not afraid to ask questions. Her other superpower is that she doesn’t sleep. Two hours every night.’
She also fed the frenzy over her connection with handsome Powell, which Gluck said was ‘crazy’.
Sydney coolly said she was happy to embrace the narrative that she and her co-star, who were both attached at that point, were in love. ‘They want it,’ she said of the rumours circulated by fans. ‘It’s fun to give it to ’em.’
Did her film producer fiance Jonathan Davino find it fun? Maybe not. Sources say there were serious problems in their romance for some time before they called it quits this spring, having been together since 2018. Even starring in the flop Madame Web seems not to have dented the impression that she is on a hot streak.
Next up is a thriller, The Housemaid, in which she stars alongside Amanda Seyfried. Sydney is also an executive producer on the movie, based on the best-selling novel by Freida McFadden. And there is already an Oscar buzz surrounding hard-hitting biopic Christy, in which she portrays former champion boxer Christy Martin, who is abused by her husband. It was hailed as one of the strongest films at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month.
There will also be a third series of Euphoria and a role as Vertigo actress Kim Novak in the film Scandalous, exploring her romance with Sammy Davis Jr. There is talk, too, of a reboot of Barbarella, with Sydney taking on the sex bomb role which Jane Fonda made iconic.
‘I find power in my femininity,’ she says. ‘I use my brain and I use everything that I’m learning every single day in this industry as my power.’
What she has is the looks of an old-Hollywood bombshell coupled with genuine acting ability, a relentless work ethic and an ability not to care about cultural wars, social media, or any of the noise made by her own celebrity. It’s a killer combination and the industry bible Variety has this week put her in its Women of Power list.
That’s unsurprising as, with the help of agency Paradigm, she has picked up a string of endorsements alongside her acting roles, capitalising ruthlessly on her commercial clout.
Earlier this year she started selling soaps which include her bathwater in a stunt for the trendy brand Dr Squatch. She also rather notoriously boasted about her ‘great genes’ in an advert for the jeans brand American Eagle.
And she’s partnered with Miu Miu, Armani Beauty, Kerastase hair products, Laneige skincare, and Baskin Robbins ice cream. Marketers believe her power lies in her cross-generational appeal – to everyone from Boomers to Gen Z.
This is despite what appears to be an alignment with the unfashionable-in-Hollywood Right. A party for her mother’s 60th birthday in 2022 showed guests in MAGA-style red caps which read ‘Make Sixty Great Again’, some of them also seemed to be in pro-police ‘Blue Lives Matter’ clothes.
She said: ‘There were so many misinterpretations. The people in the pictures weren’t even my family. The people who brought the things people were upset about were my mom’s friends from LA, who have kids that are walking outside in the Pride parade, and they thought it would be funny to wear because they were coming to Idaho.’
She went on: ‘People are so fast to build someone up and then they love tearing them down. It’s fascinating to see. Three years ago, I was going to college just like everybody else. And all of a sudden, I’m not a human any more.’
But, with the revelation of her apparent registration as a Republican voter, and her appearance at the wedding of Jeff Bezos to Lauren Sanchez in Venice (who went to the Trump inauguration) it seems that she is quietly aligned on the Right of the political divide.
Into this mix we must add Braun, the powerful music manager who is most famous for his dispute with Taylor Swift. It’s not a move a strategist would advise.
Braun is infamous among Swifties for acquiring the Love Story singer’s master recordings of her first six albums when he bought her former label in 2019 – a transaction which Taylor claimed was carried out without her permission. She later recorded the tracks afresh.
Taylor accused him of ‘incessant, manipulative bullying’ and said his team had wanted her to sign an ‘ironclad NDA’ before any negotiations could start.
For his part, Braun said his family had received ‘numerous death threats’ in the wake of the dispute, including a phone call to his then-wife threatening the safety of their children. He said that all his attempts to discuss the issue with Taylor had been ignored.
Taylor regained the rights to all of her music earlier this year – reportedly buying them back for as much as $600million – marking the end of the bitter six-year battle. Matt Belloni, the influential editor of the Puck newsletter, wrote when news of Braun’s romance with Sydney broke three weeks ago that it would work against her.
Whether the relationship endears or alienates fans remains to be seen. What’s certain is that Sydney’s star will continue to rise – justifying all the sacrifices her family made to launch her career.
Source: Dailymail.co.uk | Read the Full Story…
