E10 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022
MOVIESprestige TV landscape. “I don’t
even get my g eneration,” Sweeney
says, yet she has become some-
thing of an avatar for Gen Z,
encapsulating adults’ twin con-
cerns about teens today: that they
are either like Olivia — manipula-
tive, ruthless — or Cassie — so
hungry for approval that they
make themselves easy prey. In
portraying both, Sweeney has
found herself at the center of two
charged cultural conversations
around the depiction of young
women on television.
“Your eyes are drawn to her,”
White said. “She doesn’t have to
do a lot to bring you in. And it was
something that I didn’t even real-
ly realize [until] we were editing:
There’s just something about her.
She’s a l ittle scene-stealer. She just
has that thing that makes some-
one a star.”Sweeney has been aimed ar-
row-straight at the career
she now has since she was a
tween in Spokane, Wash., and an
independent movie was being
shot in her state. She persuaded
her parents to let her audition by
putting together a presentation
on a five-year business plan of
what would happen if she got the
role: an agent in Seattle, commer-
cials for a reel, travel to Los Ange-
les, then booking a TV show dur-
ing pilot season. Her parents, fig-
uring nothing would come of in-
dulging this fantasy, relented, and
Sweeney got the part. (Perhaps
you caught her cinematic debut in
“ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruc-
tion”?)
What followed, Sweeney says,
was seven years of auditioning
and landing nearly nothing. “I
was getting small, really cringe-
worthy things,” she says. After
two years, her family relocated to
L.A. to support her still-nascent
career. “People from back home ...
didn’t understand what we were
doing, and so I got a lot of hate for
that,” Sweeney says. “I was getting
so many terrible phone calls and
emails and just random text mes-
sages from people telling me I
should kill myself, that I’m ugly,
[and] telling my parents they
can't believe that they’re letting
their daughter go to a hell-ridden
city.”
Sweeney struggled to assimi-
late at her high school in Bur-
bank. She regularly missed class
for auditions (though still gradu-
ated valedictorian), and she says
her 1990 Volvo that “leaked oil
everywhere” was formally exiled
from the gated student parking
lot to make space for her class-rodically distant from the roles
that made her famous, two unsta-
ble young women with no idea
who they really are, one of whom
she doesn’t even like. When she
watched herself as Olivia in “The
White Lotus,” Sweeney says, “I
was like, ‘I cannot stand this girl.
If I ever ran into her, I’d be so
scared.’ ” People have asked
Sweeney if they think Cassie and
Olivia would be friends. To which
she replies: “You really think Oliv-
ia would be friends with any-
body?”
“The White Lotus” is a classic
Mike White creation, a biting,
uneasy satire about rich people in
paradise who keep finding ways
to be miserable on a luxury vaca-
tion. Olivia’s best friend could be
lying to her, her dad could have
cancer, and all her brother’s
earthly possessions could be
swept up by the sea — and she
would look on, bored by it all, a
droll comment always at the
ready.
“I just thought there was real
courage in the way she was able to
understand and tap into that kind
of cynical coverup that I think so
many young people do,” said Con-
nie Britton, Sweeney’s TV mom
on “The White Lotus.” “She was
able to capture that in such a
nuanced and honest way, in a way
that another actor might have
thought they really had to play
that. Sydney never played it. She
just embodied it.”
Meanwhile, “Euphoria” feels
like it was concocted in a lab to
incite panic among anyone old
enough to remember where they
were on 9/11. A chaotic, hedonis-
tic swirl of sex, glitter and fenta-
nyl, the series premiered in mid-
2019, right around when TikTok
exploded, and seems designed
with that app’s frenetic, remixed
consumption in mind. Though
she’s sometimes on screen for
only minutes of the hour-long
episodes, Sweeney’s a breakout
star online, her darkly comic big
swings as meme-able as they
come: waking up at 4 a.m. to have
a manic episode via elaborate
skin care routine; drunkenly wail-
ing along to Sinead O’Connor
while using a bottle of wine as a
microphone; projectile-vomiting
into a hot tub; scream-crying in
the girls’ bathroom that she has
“never, EVER been happier.”
Between the two shows,
Sweeney has basically been
crowned Miss Teen HBO, a regu-
lar presence on Sunday nights,
the most prestigious time slot in
SWEENEY FROM E1
Sweeney’s portrayals spark conversations on Gen ZEDDY CHEN/HBOMARIO PEREZ/HBOGEORGE KRAYCHYK/HULUTOP: Sydney Sweeney’s
character on “Euphoria,”
Cassie, is a naive romantic
who is hungry for approval
and scorned for her alleged
promiscuity. MIDDLE: On
“The White Lotus,” she
plays Olivia, a malicious
and manipulative cynic.
BOTTOM: Before she was a
breakout star on those two
HBO shows, she portrayed
a pious bride on “The
Handmaid’s Tale” on Hulu.