Sydney Sweeney Was Told Not To Audition For Her Best Role
Sydney Sweeney is rising in Hollywood with Emmy nominations, hit shows, and blockbuster movies, but people haven't always supported her.
This article is more than 2 years old
Sydney Sweeney is having an enormous breakout moment. She has two Primetime Emmy nominations (for two different major shows on HBO, no less), she is going to be starring in an upcoming installment of the rapidly expanding Sony Pictures universe of comic book movies, and she has rapidly become a style icon with partnerships with Armani Beauty, Miu Miu, and Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty. In short, things seem pretty good for Sydney Sweeney, but it turns out that not everyone in the world believed in her. According to a recent interview, she was actually discouraged from auditioning for the role that broke her out to mainstream audiences: Euphoria’s Cassie Howard.
According to a recent spread in The Hollywood Reporter, Sydney Sweeney was told by the casting director of Euphoria that she was not right for the role of Cassie Howard and not to even bother auditioning. However, she persisted and her agent passed her a script for the show (apparently a leftover from other clients’ auditions). Sydney Sweeney says she did a reading on tape with her mother and sent it to the show, who booked her directly (presumably bypassing the casting director who didn’t see her as Cassie). Still, Sydney Sweeney says of the casting director: “I love her now.”
This kind of Hollywood story is the stuff people love to read, as it shows the persistence of actors trying to make it big in Tinseltown. But even before Sydney Sweeney was cast on Euphoria, she was an up-and-comer in show business. Her family relocated to Los Angeles when she was 14 to support her career, and she quickly began picking up small parts in major shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Pretty Little Liars, and Criminal Minds. She was cast as the lead of the Netflix comedy-drama period piece Everything Sucks!, which premiered in 2018. While the show only lasted one season, it is telling that Sydney Sweeney was already on the up and up.
She began her continuing work with HBO with a recurring role in the mini-series Sharp Objects. Sydney Sweeney was initially cast in a small role as protagonist Amy Adams’ roommate at a psychiatric institute, with the role expanding as the show producers saw more of her work. She appeared in a recurring role on the hit dystopian Hulu show The Handmaid’s Tale, and in a small role in Quentin Tarantino’s Academy Award-winning film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In short, things are looking pretty good for Sydney Sweeney.
Sydney Sweeney has come under some criticism recently for slightly tone-deaf stories of her career, in which she laments not being able to take six-month breaks from working (which is probably an experience known to the majority of America) and that she made the move into having more revenue streams through fashion partnerships in order to facilitate her standard of living (which is sort of what jobs are for). Nevertheless, Sydney Sweeney is already a veteran of Hollywood at the young age of 24 and deserves some credit for working through the discouragement that a working actor can receive.
