Not just a pretty face: Sydney Sweeney sending retailer’s stock price surging another example of her savvy

In the upcoming season of TV comedy Platonic, characters played by Seth Rogen and Beck Bennett spend a decent amount of time bonding over their shared Sydney Sweeney obsession.

There are a lot of comments about her attractiveness – which, let’s be real, she very obviously is – but one of them also says, “She is the strongest argument for a god”.

When the character played by Rose Byrne returns to the table, having heard this whole exchange, she chastises them as middle-aged guys lusting over a “23-year-old and an idiot”, to which one of them replies, “She’s 27 and she was the head of her high school robotics team”.

There is something about Sweeney that makes a lot of people – men, women and non-binary alike – lose their minds.

Overnight, American fashion retailer American Eagle’s stock price went up 10 per cent, according to Reuters, after it unveiled a new denim campaign featuring Sweeney, with the tagline, “Sydney Sweeney has great (American Eagle) jeans”.

She’s not the first celebrity to move the dial on the stock market (Justin Bieber did the same for Crocs in 2020), but it’s still rare, and it speaks to Sweeney’s position in the popular imagination.

When Sweeney hosted Saturday Night Live in 2024, she riffed in the opening monologue that there was a back-up when she gave her parents her five-year showbusiness plan: “Show boobs”.

It was a masterstroke because it declared she was in on the joke. Yes, she’s “stacked”, as Rogen and Bennett’s characters said in that scene, but the other part of that SNL bit (and the Platonic scene) is that she is strategic and smart.

Sweeney is more than her body. A lot of women in Hollywood have bedroom eyes and desirable physiques, but few have had the career she has in the past five years.

She landed her first roles as a child star at the age of 12 and spent a few years kicking around in small films such as The Ward or on guest spots on Heroes, Criminal Minds and Grey’s Anatomy.

Her first break came in the form of the largely forgotten 2018 Netflix teen comedy Everything Sucks. Despite positive reviews, it was cancelled after one season but by then, Sweeney was getting booked for bigger projects including The Handmaid’s Tale and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

For younger audiences, she really gained traction as one of the leads of Euphoria, the Zendaya-fronted HBO drama that draws massive audiences for the prestige programmer. Her character Cassie was described by W magazine as a “sex bomb”, renowned for her risqué relationships and dalliances.

But if Euphoria passed some audiences by, they didn’t miss that first season of The White Lotus, with Sweeney a standout in that a hefty ensemble cast.

That awards season, she was a double nominee for both shows, and at the same time, sparked headlines when she admitted in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter that despite her high-profile, she couldn’t afford to take six months off.

Actors rarely talk about money in frank terms, especially when they’re seen as successful and in-demand, but Sweeney gave insight into the costs of her job – paying for business managers, lawyers, agents and publicists whose fees are higher than her mortgage payments.

She’s also been open about not having money growing up, and how her family of four had to cram into a single motel room when they relocated to Los Angeles to pursue her acting goals.

It makes sense that she’s practical about the business side of the industry, and took brand deals with Miu Miu, Armani and Laneige to pay for the life of a young actor. American Eagle is one of at least 10 brands she’s signed to.

More significantly, what Sweeney did was deal herself into the process – and profit – of filmmaking.

One of the films she made through Fifty-Fifty Films, the production company she set up in 2020, was Immaculate. She came across the script a decade ago, had auditioned but the movie went away. Sweeney never forgot about it.

After production on The White Lotus, Sweeney tracked down the screenwriter Andrew Lobel and bought the rights, recruited one of the HBO drama’s producers, David Bernad, and hired director Michael Mohan, who she previously worked with on Everything Sucks and The Voyeurs, while her former fiancé and producer Jonathan Davino set up financing.

Immaculate wouldn’t have happened without her assembling everyone together, and the horror movie grossed $US35 million from a $US9 million budget.

Then there was Anyone But You, on which she was an executive producer and worked, reportedly, tirelessly to get the film up. She told The Seattle Times she put the package together, helping to cast the movie and sold it to Sony.

But first, she had to do Madame Web, a Spider-Man spin-off with Dakota Johnson that was widely derided on release. Sweeney was copacetic about it, and saw the long-term benefits.

“To me, that film was a building block, it’s what allowed me to build a relationship with Sony. Without doing Madame Web, I wouldn’t have a relationship with the decision-makers over there,” she said in 2022.

“Everything in my career I do not just for that story, but strategic business decisions. Because I did that, I was able to sell Anyone But You.”

Anyone But You was made for $US25 million, and shot in Australia. It wasn’t a critical darling, but its sunny vibes and clever marketing campaign, plus the use of Natasha Beddingfield’s infectious nostalgic pop hit Unwritten, fuelled it to $US220 million at the box office, a massive result for a theatrical release rom-com.

Still to come is a third season of Euphoria, The Housemaid, a Paul Feig-directed thriller based on a bestselling novel, and Christy, a biopic about the 1990s boxer, Christy Martin directed by Australian filmmaker David Michod.

So, some people might see Sydney Sweeney in only one way, but she’s certainly not an “idiot”.