Almost exactly three years ago, in July 2022, the actor Sydney Sweeney gave an interview to the Hollywood Reporter that was refreshingly frank about finances.

At the time, Sweeney was 24, fresh off the contentious buzz of Euphoria’s second season, and undeniably on the up in Hollywood as one of Gen Z’s very few in-demand actors. And yet, as she told the magazine, she did not have the money to cover even a six-month break from the industry. Unlike some of her Euphoria peers, Sweeney is not a nepo baby; she was raised middle-class in northern Idaho and Spokane, Washington, and began working as a child actor at 13. She acted continuously throughout her teens – on Criminal Minds and Grey’s Anatomy, then small roles on prestige projects like Sharp Objects, The Handmaid’s Tale and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood – because there was no fallback cushion. “I don’t have someone supporting me, I don’t have anyone I can turn to, to pay my bills or call for help,” she said.

Even after working on a hit HBO show, which did allow her to buy a house in LA, money was tight. “They don’t pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals,” Sweeney explained. “The established stars still get paid, but I have to give 5 percent to my lawyer, 10 percent to my agents, 3 percent or something like that to my business manager. I have to pay my publicist every month, and that’s more than my mortgage.” Sweeney spoke with the authority and detail of someone who actually had to review her budget every month – for the stylist, the publicist, the makeup, the travel, the unspoken demands of being a fame-aiming young actor in the Instagram age, and particularly a young beautiful woman. Hence, her many brand deals – Miu Miu, Armani, Laneige. “If I just acted, I wouldn’t be able to afford my life in LA,” she said. “I take deals because I have to.”

I still think about this interview whenever Sweeney’s name comes up, which is too often lately. For one, it’s still the most transparent I’ve ever heard an actor of her cohort be about money – no one is talking about paying their publicist or their mortgage – and two, it helps explain her increasingly omnipresent and fractious brand deals that have arguably eclipsed her acting work. Sweeney doesn’t just rep high-end fashion labels like Miu Miu, typical for actors attempting the enter the rarefied field of movie stardom; she’s now also selling soap allegedly containing a “touch” of her bathwater for Dr Squatch, ice-cream for Baskin-Robbins, and fuzzy pink loafers for who knows who. You may have heard that she’s recently found herself in the culture-war crosshairs over some ads for American Eagle. As the camera pans over a horizontal Sweeney zipping up her tight blue jeans, she says in typical monotone: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans are blue.” Another spot finds her admonishing a wandering camera away from her two most talked-about assets – “eyes up here”.

The ad, predictably, caused a stir on an internet where everything is now ragebait – the posting left said its invocation of Americana and “great genes” dogwhistled white supremacy, the Maga right celebrated it as a nail in the coffin of “wokeness”. (For what it’s worth, American Eagle has said that the campaign “is and always was about the jeans”.) Trump posted about it on Truth Social. And all of that was before it was revealed that Sweeney registered as a Republican in Florida in June 2024.

All of this, it must be noted, has happened without Sweeney publicly saying a thing. (One can assume, based on her comments about money and an old social media brouhaha about Maga family members, that she supported Donald Trump in 2024, and that she moved to Florida for tax reasons. But until Sweeney confirms anything, these remain assumptions.) How does a relatively successful Hollywood actor with at least one box office hit under her belt – that would be the middling but popular 2024 romcom Anyone But You – end up this polarizing?

Two separate but inextricable things: an incendiary combination of social media’s death spiral into hollow, fleeting culture wars, and a career spent walking the perilously thin line between poking fun at male egos and inflating them. The former is more easily identified – the internet culture Substack Garbage Day traced the American Eagle controversy to a familiar pattern of activity on X, a site that is a fraction of the size it used to be and is now about 75% bots; the remaining holdouts are “conservative aggregators, business world influencers, celebrity stan accounts, and libs who won’t leave the site and still post like it’s 2018”. The ad, an artless mix of lowest-common denominator triggers, worked on all four groups. The cycle frothed enough on X over a weekend to get picked up by Fox News, then the most smug Maga politicians looking for a dunk, and then, inevitably, the president who must always get in on the attention. In the posting economy, all that matters is that the controversy feels real, and everyone is talking about it.

Whatever the actual size of the outrage – I, for one, sense more fatigue than actual anger – the chatter does represent a natural endpoint to Sweeney’s longstanding tactic of being the first to acknowledge, and now bank on, male attention on her breasts, and to be ruthlessly pragmatic about business. Both are dubious tactics with, I’d argue, diminishing returns. I have been a fan of Sweeney’s since she broke out as a terrifyingly droll gen Z menace on the first season of the White Lotus in 2020, and I date the shift to 2022, around the time of that landmark THR interview. When I interviewed Sweeney in 2021, the then-23-year-old was as open about her business ambitions – getting a bachelor’s degree to prevent getting “fucked over” by contract negotiations, producing her own projects – as she was wary about the internet’s outrage machine. She was promoting her erotic thriller The Voyeurs, in which she appeared nude, and dealing with the aftermath of nude screenshots from Euphoria making the rounds online. Her strategy for handling it all, she told me, was dissociation: “I never actually put Syd out there,” she said. “No one really knows Syd.”

In the years since, Sweeney seems to have adopted a more offensive approach to the attention – and her elevation by the male right as, to quote the New Yorker’s Lauren Michele Jackson, “rejoicing in a perceived return to a bygone beauty standard in the wake of all that overzealous feminism they blame on the left” – by turning it into money and a punchline. She poked fun at boob fixation with a Hooters skit on SNL; she wore a sweatshirt blaring “SORRY FOR HAVING GREAT TITS AND CORRECT OPINIONS”; she routinely addresses the boobs in the room with a broad-like confidence. “The biggest misconception about me is that I’m a dumb blonde with big tits,” she said in an interview last year. “I’m naturally a brunette.” Cue laughs. At the same time, she’s exemplified the pop feminist mantra of getting one’s bag – starring in the dreadful Madame Web was a “business decision” to network with Sony execs and get her planned Barbarella remake greenlit and Anyone But You sold, which she successfully marketed on her own TikTok. Taking every brand deal while producing would-be auteur horror with Immaculate.

All of this has, unfortunately, overshadowed a promising dramatic acting career, as demonstrated by a remarkable turn in Reality, as a real-life whisteblower brimming with anxiety and righteousness; in The Voyeurs, a throwback erotic thriller that would have made more of a splash had it not been dropped on Amazon; on Euphoria, where she imbued the beleaguered Cassie with a real sense of teenage volatility. Amid the political controversy, Sweeney remains, as ever, booked and busy. She’s making an awards play with Christy, as the 90s boxer Christy Martin, aiming critical buzz with the Housemaid, Paul Feig’s film alongside Amanda Seyfried. She’s locked down two huge video game remakes with Michael Bay and Jon M Chu, secured the role of 50s bombshell Kim Novak in Colman Domingo’s directorial debut Scandalous!, just appeared alongside Julianne Moore in yet another forgettable Apple TV+ film. On the acting side, she’s still the young woman from three years ago, clear-eyed about the industry, trying everything, lining up the work. For all our sakes, let’s hope the conversation gets back there, too.