Sydney Sweeney is a new kind of Hollywood shapeshifter

In the second episode of “Euphoria” season three, Sydney Sweeney lounges poolside in skin-tight pants and a Barbie-pink crop top, eyes bugging out of her skull. She’s in character as the beautiful and desperate Cassie Howard, trying to convince her best-friend-turned-romantic-rival, Maddy Perez (Alexa Demie), to propel her to internet stardom.

“I just feel like if more people knew me, I would be huge,” Cassie proclaims with childlike pride. When Maddy observes that “the market is oversaturated with a lot of girls like you,” meaning pretty blonde influencers, Cassie waves away her doubt with a perfectly manicured hand. Success — particularly the kind of lucrative, external ubiquity that Cassie is seeking on Instagram and OnlyFans — is not about having good taste or a clear sense of self, she posits. There is power in a blank canvas.

“I can be anything,” Cassie concludes.

This mantra may feel familiar to those following Sweeney’s real-life exploits. To the untrained eye, her constant churn of business opportunities and brand deals (A lingerie line! That controversial American Eagle campaign! A soap that is… made with her bathwater?) hardly illustrates care or discernment. It’s tempting to read Cassie’s season three arc — chasing fame and fortune by leveraging her body and lack of a “moral code,” in Maddy’s words — as a cruel meta-commentary on Sweeney’s own trajectory since “Euphoria” premiered in 2019. Whether it’s Cassie’s debasing plea for Maddy’s help or her disastrous wedding to Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) in episode three, which leaves the bride bawling on the floor of her tacky mansion, Sweeney’s Cassie is made to play the fool.

In reality, it’s far more likely that Sweeney knows exactly what she’s doing. She’s an Emmy-nominated actor with agency, bankability, and, by all accounts, an open line of communication with “Euphoria” showrunner Sam Levinson. “I adore Sydney,” Levinson recently told The New York Times. “Before I wrote this season, she called me and she said, ‘Just do me one favor: Make sure Cassie’s crazy.'”

Sweeney characterized her request similarly in a 2023 interview with Variety: “‘Give me more,'” she said she told Levinson. “‘I’m going to show you what I have. There’s so much to this girl.'”

That Sweeney is game to play Cassie as increasingly shameless and attention-starved to encourage the audience to laugh at her expense signals that she’s in on the joke — perhaps more so than the internet may realize.

Sweeney is a blank canvas by design

In her offscreen life, Sweeney is routinely undogmatic. The 28-year-old, who was raised near the Washington-Idaho border, tends to deflect political questions with a deft touch of vagueness. What was it like to see President Donald Trump praising her “Great Jeans” campaign with American Eagle? “It was surreal.” What about the backlash to photos from her mom’s birthday party, where guests were pictured wearing MAGA-inspired hats? “There were so many misinterpretations.” Does she ever plan to make it clear where she stands? “I’m not a political person.”

As a result, Sweeney has been portrayed as every bogeywoman across the political spectrum, from a clueless puppet of the patriarchy to an anti-woke crusader to a sexually empowered girlboss.

The one thing you can’t call Sweeney? A hypocrite.

If celebrities get the most heat when their actions go against their professed or even perceived values, there’s a business incentive to stay silent. After all, you can’t betray a cause if you don’t have one.

The rare stance Sweeney reveals, like the time she declared that “we should all love each other,” is so utterly bland that she remains free to make money however she likes, without the risk of breaking her word or reneging on her principles.

And make money she does. There’s the aforementioned collaboration with American Eagle and the now-infamous Dr. Squatch bar of soap purportedly made with Sweeney’s “actual bathwater,” but those are just the ads that caused the most brouhaha. In addition to launching her own lingerie line, she’s also partnered with Laneige, Kérastase, Heydude, Dickies, Ford, and Baskin-Robbins, among others.

Skincare, hair care, footwear, workwear, cars, ice cream — who cares? Sydney Sweeney can be anything, which, in today’s creator economy, actually means “sell anything.”

Sweeney’s indistinct personal brand has kept professional doors open

It looks like Cassie may be on to something; Sweeney hasn’t needed to display good taste or a clear sense of self to become a household name, let alone a full-blown movie star.

For all the public’s attempts to pin down her position in the culture wars, Sweeney has built a surprisingly varied filmography. Her poker face has worn many onscreen masks: Eden Blaine, a child bride in a dystopian theocracy (“The Handmaid’s Tale”); Christy Martin, a pioneering boxer and out lesbian (“Christy”); Julia Cornwall, a teenager-turned-superhero (“Madame Web”); Millie Calloway, a scrappy young woman with a taste for vengeance (“The Housemaid”); Sister Cecilia, a nun subjected to unrelenting body horror (“Immaculate”); Reality Winner, a real-life whistleblower who leaked information about Russian interference in the 2016 US elections (“Reality”); and more.

Notably, several of Sweeney’s character arcs, including in “Euphoria,” are shaped by sexism, objectification, and systematic oppression. When GQ asked about the recurring theme of domestic abuse in Sweeney’s work, she replied with her signature hedging. “I always speak out about something that is important to me. And for me to speak out, I use art,” she said. “Through my characters in my movies, it’s a way for me to be able to do my part and spread awareness in different ways through my characters.”

One could argue that Sweeney’s lack of political conviction, particularly in our hyper-polarized world, translates more as complicity than neutrality — and many do. Sweeney’s persona has been described as conservative-coded, an assumption bolstered by BuzzFeed’s 2025 report that she registered as a Republican voter in Florida the previous year.

Still, Sweeney has been careful not to pursue the path of proudly conservative celebrities like Gina Carano or Roseanne Barr, who lost a role in a major franchise and a bespoke ABC sitcom, respectively, after sharing transphobic and racist views on social media. Barr later blamed the “Roseanne” cancellation on her support of Trump: “That is not allowed in Hollywood,” she said.

Sweeney may be surrounded by costars and potential employers who oppose her political party, but you wouldn’t know it from her résumé. She walks a finer line than her willfully pigeonholed peers. Call it plausible deniability or savvy self-marketing, but either way, Sweeney is collecting paychecks from all sides.