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Just about everyone would agree that Sydney Sweeney was one of pop culture’s main characters in 2025. But in the same way you can be Time magazine’s Person of the Year in the good way or the dictator way, there’s no consensus on whether being the subject of endless chatter has helped or hurt the 28-year-old actress’s ascent to movie stardom. This month alone, while some headlines are declaring her career dead, others have named her one of the year’s biggest winners. The cowards at Time magazine may have sidestepped the all-important Sweeney question by going with the “Architects of AI,” whatever that means, as their person of the year, but luckily they don’t have a monopoly on doling out judgements. With her last new project of 2025, The Housemaid, out in theaters this weekend, let’s take stock of a very Sweeney-full year.
The controversy over the American Eagle ad Sweeney starred in over the summer whipped up such a frenzy that it understandably overshadows everything else, but the truth is that 2025 would qualify as a dramatic year for her even without the jeans wars. Her first major news moment came in March when she called off her wedding and ended a seven-year-long relationship—a huge life change!—which led to a brief revival of the rumors of a romance with her former co-star, Glen Powell. Public sentiment seemed to be cheering Sweeney on up to this point, but that started to change circa June, when she became the face of a limited-edition line of soap that purported to be made from her bath water. Yes, that was this year! She later criticized the backlash that followed as “sexist.”
In the summer, Sweeney attended the tackiest event of the year, the Bezos-Sanchez wedding in Venice. This may have been where she first started hanging out with Scooter Braun, the music industry player and Taylor Swift foe who she has now been dating—or at least making out with atop big rocks in Central Park—for the past few months. If Sweeney were being strategic, she might have observed how excited her fans were about the idea of her and Powell as a couple and decided to date, if not him, someone like him. Instead, she went in the complete opposite direction. They were first spotted together only about a month after her American Eagle ad became a cultural flashpoint, all around the time it was revealed that last year she registered as a Republican in Florida.
So far, that’s a lot of drama over ads and her personal life and not a whole lot of “starring in movies and TV shows,” Sweeney’s ostensible main job. Her first movie of the year, Echo Valley, didn’t make much noise upon its release in June—after a limited theatrical run, it wound up on Apple TV+ along with a bunch of other movies no one seems to watch (good TV shows though!). When Christy flopped in November, putting a damper on Sweeney’s hopes for an Oscar run this year, it may have been embarrassing for her, but it wasn’t the death knell for her career some made it out to be. The audience for an indie movie about a forgotten boxer was always going to be limited, and movies across the board have had a tough fall. Given that Sweeney already has a major hit under her belt with Anyone but You, the same industry that gave Armie Hammer years of chances at being a star is unlikely to abandon her after a few bombs. Even if some potential employers are worried about Sweeney’s extracurriculars becoming a liability—and it’s not totally clear that they are—there aren’t exactly a ton of other bankable actresses ready to take her place. Minting new stars is increasingly difficult business, and Sweeney remains one of Hollywood’s best hopes.
So while The Housemaid probably isn’t Sweeney’s last chance to prove herself or anything so dramatic, it will be interesting to see how it performs. It has going for it that, unlike the more niche Christy, a psychological thriller based on a hit novel could theoretically have the same kind of mass appeal as Anyone but You (which also had a late-December release). Will the primarily female readers of the novel show up for it, or have they in particular soured on Sweeney? It Ends With Us could be a useful, though complicated, comparison here—readers of the novel it was based on conspired to make the movie a huge box-office draw in 2023, even amid the toxic discourse surrounding its stars Blake Lively and director Justin Baldoni.
The Housemaid, which was directed by Paul Feig and is reminiscent of his 2018 hit A Simple Favor, finally feels like the right lane for Sweeney. She plays a woman named Millie who is desperate for a job (because she’s a convict, and though Sweeney isn’t exactly convincing as someone who did hard time, just go with it) and finds work as live-in help for Amanda Seyfried’s Nina, a wealthy suburban mother and wife. As Nina quickly reveals herself to be much less stable than she initially seemed and the job turns into a nightmare, Millie bonds with the sympathetic husband, Andrew. Though it’s usually a nanny and not a maid in the tabloids, you know what happens next—and Sweeney ends up being an inspired choice to play a home-wrecker. Anyone who’s been annoyed by her antics can both roll their eyes and find satisfaction in watching her get mistreated and transgress herself. Still, there are twists along the way that give her a chance to redeem herself and remind people that she actually is fun to watch when she’s not mumbling about denim.
Sweeney has no doubt made some confusing choices this year. When she had the chance to disavow the white supremacist interpretation of her American Eagle ad a few months after the fact in a GQ interview, why didn’t she take it? Why did she instead offer a mealymouthed statement a few weeks later about being “against hate and divisiveness”? Why is she dating someone she knows is widely reviled? If she’s a Republican, why did she make a movie about a lesbian boxer? Why did she get a bob and start dressing like a Fox News anchor, only to put in extensions and decide to channel Marilyn Monroe instead? The Housemaid doesn’t answer any of these questions, but it does point to a path forward for the actress: showing that none of this matters all that much as long as she manages to make an actually entertaining movie once in a while.
