Sydney Sweeney

Sydney Bernice Sweeney (born September 12, 1997) is an American actress. She gained early recognition for her roles in Everything Sucks!, The Handmaid's Tale, and Sharp Objects in 2018. She received wider acclaim for her performances in the drama series Euphoria (2019–present) and the first season of the anthology series The White Lotus (2021), both of which earned her nominations for Primetime Emmy Awards.

In film, Sweeney appeared in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) and later had leading roles in the drama film Reality and the romantic comedy Anyone but You, both in 2023. In 2024, she played Julia Cornwall in the superhero film Madame Web and starred in the horror film Immaculate.

Sydney Bernice Sweeney was born on September 12, 1997, in Spokane, Washington. Her mother is a former criminal defense lawyer, and her father works in the hospitality industry. She has one brother. Sweeney was raised in the Idaho panhandle along the Washington border, at a rural lakeside home that her family has inhabited for five generations. She has said her family is religious. Sweeney attended school at Saint George's School in Spokane. She was active in numerous sports: "I was in every single sport possible", she said. "I was on the soccer team, the baseball team, the snow slalom ski team, I was wakeboarding." Sweeney said she had a wakeboarding accident as a child when the edge of her board propelled backward and sliced the area next to her eye, leaving a permanent scar. She also did combat sports, including taekwondo, jujitsu, grappling, and kickboxing. Sweeney has mentioned she began practicing combat sports at age 5 to help manage her hyperactivity.

Sweeney became interested in acting after auditioning to be an extra in an independent film that was shooting in the Spokane area. To convince her parents to allow her to pursue acting, she presented them with a five-year business plan. Sweeney began to audition and book commercial acting jobs in Seattle and Portland, Oregon, where the family temporarily resided, until choosing to move to Los Angeles when she was 13 years old. In high school, Sweeney was on the robotics team and in the mathematics club. She was valedictorian of her graduating class at Brighton Hall School in Burbank, California. In 2016, Sweeney briefly worked at Universal Studios Hollywood, but left after she had been hired for an acting job. She also briefly attended the University of California, Los Angeles.

Beginning her career as a child actress, Sweeney debuted on television in 2009 with a bit part in an episode of the series Heroes. Her first film role was in the 2010 horror comedy ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction. She played supporting roles in television shows such as 90210, Criminal Minds, Grey's Anatomy and Pretty Little Liars. In 2018, she starred as Emaline Addario in the Netflix series Everything Sucks!, which revolved around two groups of high school students in Oregon in 1996. She then appeared in the HBO miniseries Sharp Objects, recurring as Alice, a roommate whom Amy Adams's character meets at a psychiatric facility. Her character originally had a smaller role, but the director kept bringing her in for more scenes. For the role, Sweeney studied stories of girls who experience mental illness and self-harming, and visited hospitals with patients who self-harmed. She filmed Everything Sucks! and Sharp Objects concurrently, the former during the week and latter on weekends.

Sweeney had a role in the 2018 film Under the Silver Lake. She had a recurring role in the second season of the dystopian drama series The Handmaid's Tale as Eden Spencer, a pious and obedient girl from the totalitarian and theocratic Republic of Gilead. She also starred as the heroine of the horror film Along Came the Devil. In 2019, Sweeney appeared in the drama film Clementine, the coming-of-age film Big Time Adolescence, and Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

In June 2019, Sweeney began portraying Cassie Howard, a teenager with a promiscuous reputation, in the HBO drama series Euphoria. The show was a breakout hit, becoming the second most watched HBO series. Her performance was praised, earning a nomination for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series in 2022. Variety wrote that her performance "proves that Sweeney's one hell of a shapeshifter between her deft turns in this, The Handmaid's Tale, Everything Sucks and Sharp Objects." Her many nude scenes in the series received significant attention, generating discussions about nudity in film and the male gaze. Sweeney has said she does not consider on-screen nudity a boundary.

In 2020, Sweeney founded the production company Fifty-Fifty Films. The same year, she starred in the television film Nocturne and Webtoon's live-action advertisement for the online comic Lore Olympus, appearing as Persephone. In 2021, Sweeney appeared in the first season of Mike White's anthology series The White Lotus as a sardonic college sophomore. For that performance, she was nominated for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie in 2022. She appeared on the Time 100 Next list for 2022.