Background and career
Sydney Bernice Sweeney (born September 12, 1997) is an American actress. She gained early recognition for her roles in the series Everything Sucks!, The Handmaid's Tale, and Sharp Objects in 2018. She received wider acclaim for her performances in the drama series Euphoria (2019–2026) 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 garnered critical acclaim for her performances in the drama film Reality (2023) and for her portrayal of professional boxer Christy Martin in the biopic Christy (2025), and has also appeared in the box office hits Anyone but You (2023) and The Housemaid (2025). Her other film credits include Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), Madame Web (2024), and Immaculate (2024). Sweeney has appeared in various advertising campaigns, some sparking controversy.
Sydney Bernice Sweeney was born on September 12, 1997, in Spokane, Washington. Her mother is a former criminal defense lawyer and her father—through whom she is distantly related to Marilyn Monroe— works in the hospitality industry. She has a brother, Trent, who joined the U.S. Air Force in 2020. 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 said that she was active in numerous sports, and had a wakeboarding accident as a child in which the board sliced the area next to her eye, requiring 19 stitches. Sweeney became interested in acting after auditioning for a role as an extra in an independent film 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 moving to Los Angeles at age 13. In grade school, roughly around the fourth grade, Sweeney, having developed a love of mathematics at a young age, was in a mathematics club called Math Is Cool, and the school's robotics team. She attended Brighton Hall School in Burbank, California, and was valedictorian of her graduating class. In 2016, Sweeney briefly worked at Universal Studios Hollywood, but left after she was hired for an acting job.
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. In 2011, Sweeney appeared in the short film Takeo, and the police drama series Chase, both roles earned her two nominations from the Young Artist Awards. Also in 2011, she acted in Michael Lembeck's made-for-television film The Bling Ring, based on the burglary group of the same name. Subsequently, she had 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 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 the 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 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 took the role of Cassie Howard, a teenager with a reputation for promiscuity, in the HBO drama series Euphoria. The show was a breakout hit, becoming the third most watched HBO series as of 2025. Her performance was praised, earning her 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, and generated discussions about nudity in film and the male gaze.
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.In 2023, Sweeney starred as U.S. Air Force veteran Reality Winner in Tina Satter's thriller drama Reality, which premiered in February at the 73rd Berlin Film Festival. Steph Green of IndieWire called the film "inventively mounted and extraordinarily tense" and Sweeney "the real deal". Jessica Kiang of Variety wrote that she played Winner "so convincingly that it's hard to remember her as the sardonic, pampered teen in The White Lotus, or the nice-girl-turned-nasty in Euphoria". Sweeney next had a role in the crime thriller Americana, which premiered at the South by Southwest Festival in March 2023. Sweeney appeared in the video for the Rolling Stones' single "Angry", from their 2023 album Hackney Diamonds. In response to criticism that the video objectified her, she defended it as "empowerment through embracing my body". At age 25, Sweeney was selected as one of Forbes's 2023 30 Under 30 in the celebrity category. Later that year, she and Glen Powell starred in the romantic comedy Anyone but You, which premiered in December 2023. Sweeney was an executive producer for the film and was instrumental in hiring Powell and director Will Gluck. She also contributed to the script. The film became a sleeper hit, grossing over $220 million worldwide.
