Don’t Underestimate Sydney Sweeney

Sydney Sweeney seems to enjoy making jokes about how big her breasts are. She once announced that her grandparents declared that she had the “best tits in Hollywood.” And she alluded to her bra size in her Saturday Night Live monologue this weekend, in which she described how she presented her parents with a “backup plan” if her initial attempt to break into acting failed. A PowerPoint slide flashed on the screen that read: Plan B: Show Boobs. It got a knowing laugh.

But there’s a subtly disarming quality to the way that Sweeney, best known as the star of the HBO teen drama Euphoria, acknowledges her buxomness. Yes, she tends to lead with that, but she also proves time and time again that you shouldn’t underestimate her. That was certainly the case on SNL, where she was an impressively game host, thriving in ridiculous scenarios and allowing herself to get weird. By the time the show got around to putting her in a sketch about being the highest-tipped waitress at a Hooters, it was sort of disappointing: At that point we already knew she could do a lot more than that.

Sweeney was immediately comfortable on the SNL stage in the first sketch of the night, in which she and Chloe Fineman played Gen Z “interns” at the NYPD who were shockingly adept at solving cold cases based on their social-media-stalking skills. The actress trotted out the vocal fry she used to such great effect in her Emmy-nominated performance in The White Lotus. (Lest you forget, Sweeney has two Emmy nominations under her belt; the other one for her teary, memeable work in Euphoria.) She almost seemed to upstage Fineman in the sketch, a rare feat, giving her own disaffected character a hilarious naturalism.

Whatever SNL threw at her, Sweeney committed. Take, for instance, the “Air Bud” sketch, in which she played a popular cheerleader determined to flirt with the new star player on the basketball team. It didn’t matter that the player happened to be a golden retriever, a reference to the 1997 kids’ movie Air Bud and its sequels. As the dog panted and scarfed down a sandwich, Sweeney refused to break character, demonstrating a level of dedication that sometimes even cast members can’t muster.

Throughout the night she tried on accents with varying levels of success—her Southern twang in the courtroom-set “Big Bench” was better than the New York-y lilt she was trying alongside Sarah Sherman in “Makeup Artists.” (At least, I think that’s what she was attempting.) Still, even when the task was a little beyond her skill set, nothing seemed to truly shake her. Her full immersion into whatever material she was given was also on display in a pretaped bit in which she morphed into a lovesick heroine lusting after Bowen Yang, who, for the purposes of this joke, had just been pretending to be gay this whole time.

In many ways, SNL turned out to be a good calling card for Sweeney, whose fame is still growing. If you didn’t know her before tuning in, you were likely to be impressed by her versatility and willingness to jump into the fray. For those of us who have been keeping a close eye on her career, however, it was simply proof of a pattern: Sweeney is going to defy expectations when she can.

Write Sweeney off at your own peril. Her rom-com with Glen Powell, Anyone But You, got off to a modest start when it was released in December but has now made more than $200 million worldwide. While that film made the case for her movie-star bonafides and her producing smarts, she’s also taken on smaller, more challenging roles. Last year, she played the whistleblower Reality Winner in the docudrama Reality, earning critical acclaim for her understated work as a young woman being interrogated by the FBI.

Sweeney seems to know and take almost a little bit of joy in how easily she can be pigeonholed. In a video for British Glamour she said “the biggest misconception about me is that I’m a dumb blonde with big tits” before hitting the punch line: “I’m naturally brunette.” On SNL, she played a similar game, leaning into the preconceived notions people might have based on her looks before showing off just how much she can really do. It worked like a charm.