Sydney Sweeney’s rise: Hollywood finally has an old-school movie star on its hands, and it has no idea what to do

The movie star is back. We finally have a successor to Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda and Julia Roberts. Or so the theory goes. Sydney Sweeney, sharp-witted alumna of the HBO drama Euphoria, has, for the first time in years, made a case for human tissue being more valuable than intellectual property.

The hottest Hollywood gossip this week concerned reports that Sweeney was probably not appearing in a movie. Someone decided she was set to star opposite Johnny Depp, a controversial figure since his divorce from Amber Heard, in an upcoming film called Day Drinker. There was much frothing from those for and against Depp rehabilitation before an influential publication slammed the door. “A representative for Sweeney confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that she is not involved in Day Drinker,” that magazine told us.

The point is that the commentariat believed Sweeney, currently on our screens in the well-received horror Immaculate, to be the ideal person to extract Depp from semi-cancellation. (He opens in a film later this month, so let’s not get carried away.) It was like getting an imprimatur from, well, Taylor, Fonda or Roberts.

It took Sweeney a while to become an overnight sensation. Born in Washington state during the dying days of the last century, she had early roles in series such as Everything Sucks! and The Handmaid’s Tale but really registered as part of the Euphoria ensemble from 2019. No show has, in recent years, delivered more stars to the mainstream. Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, Hunter Schafer and, from an older generation, the recent Oscar-nominee Colman Domingo all appeared alongside Sweeney in the raunchy teen drama.

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She had a smallish role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. She was brilliantly irritating in the first season of The White Lotus. The next hop up the ladder came with two very different films from 2023. Her performance as the whistleblower Reality Winner, in Reality, confirmed she could act the face off any rival. Her turn opposite Glen Powell in Anyone But You proved she could sell an apparently moribund genre. Hollywood has, so far as the big screen goes, recently given up on the romantic comedy, but that film, hanging around for months, gradually accrued $218 million.

[ Sydney Sweeney on the demands of making Reality: ‘Once we got into that room there was no way out’ ]

[ Who Trolled Amber? review: Relentless dig beneath Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard libel case makes a staggering revelation ]

Sweeney entered the new year as the anointed one, and the culture, as you knew it would, immediately went cuckoo-doolally banana-pants. The most absurd manifestations of Sweeney mania came after her appearance hosting Saturday Night Live. We shan’t dwell on the puerile language but, suffice to say, more than a few right-wing sources felt her wearing a low-cut dress somehow proved, to quote Richard Hanania, president of Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, that “wokeness is dead”.

The Spectator and the National Post, Conservative publications in, respectively, the UK and Canada, joined Hanania in his dance around the bonfire of woke. The notion that Sweeney herself might be right wing took a knock when, with Immaculate, she was seen to be producing and appearing in an attack on the Catholic Church. (It’s really not.) Hanania, also author of The Origins of Woke, had the perfect rebuttal. “I think we can reconcile this by classifying Sweeney as a member of the Nietzschean right,” he wrote. Nurse, the screens!

Never mind all that baloney. Just note that Sweeney is the one being talked about. Nobody is (to my knowledge) identifying Anya Taylor-Joy or Florence Pugh as a neo- Nietzschean. Sweeney is the one. She is here to save cinema. Forget Taylor, Fonda and Roberts. She’s Brigitte Bardot. She’s Marilyn Monroe. Right?

Okay, let’s not get carried away. Sweeney is a fine actor. She has charisma. She is smart. But she can do little to change the mechanism around her. The argument for her status as a star of the old school results, to an extent, from an apparent vacuum in the intellectual-property economy. Following the underperformance of The Marvels, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is in a state of uncertainty. DC had its own bombs with Blue Beetle and Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Even the presence of one S Sweeney in a smaller role couldn’t save Madame Web. There won’t be a new MCU film this year.

That does not, however, mean Hollywood is set for a reboot. The business has lived within the intellectual-property matrices – interconnected entities sprung from existing entertainment empires – for so long that it has forgotten how this used to be done. They once made modestly priced mysteries, dramas, musicals and romantic comedies for the big screen. Identifiable movie stars sold those genre flicks to regular attendees. An enormous turning circle is required for the good ship Hollywood to get itself back on to that sea lane.

Sweeney is a movie star. It remains to be seen if the studios still know what to do with such a being.