On a drab street in New Jersey this week, wearing a sweater, leather jacket and jeans, Sydney Sweeney was not looking her usual bombshell self. The actress, 29, is filming The Housemaid’s Secret, the sequel to the hit psychological thriller The Housemaid. She’s playing a down-at-heel domestic worker, so her usual provocative attire is not appropriate.
The initial movie, in which she starred as ex-convict Millie Calloway opposite Amanda Seyfried, was a huge box office success. It took £300million globally even though the critics thought it a ‘disposable’ piece of popcorn, and she has secured a truly sweet deal to return.
Indeed, I’m told she has a 100 per cent pay rise in her back pocket and will get a £10.7million basic salary, plus bonuses if it is a hit. That will be comfortably the biggest payday of her career.
Meanwhile, sources at her recently launched lingerie brand SYRN have leaked what appear to be booming sales figures to the New York Post.
Her personal life looks settled too, with reports suggesting that her romance with Scooter Braun, 45, is heading for marriage.
She’s even taken to attending synagogue with billionaire music mogul Braun, who is Jewish, and is apparently preparing to embrace his faith before they wed.
One source tells me they think the pair are already engaged, and if they aren’t … they expect that to change soon.
Apparently they have been living together in his Los Angeles house almost since the start of the romance, which blossomed when they met at Jeff Bezos’ wedding in Venice in the summer of 2025.
Sydney Sweeney is now filming The Housemaid’s Secret, the sequel to the hit psychological thriller The Housemaid, for which she has had a 100 per cent pay riseÂ
Sydney’s personal life looks settled too, with reports suggesting that her romance with Scooter Braun could be heading for marriage
Not everyone, though, is convinced that all is quite as picture perfect as it seems for Sydney, a controversial figure who’s never far from a scandal, almost invariably caused by her taking off her clothes in order to make money.
Sydney, for her part, is implacably sure that she is in the process of becoming a cultural icon, with Scooter by her side, steering her to the top. They both think she is ‘the next Marilyn Monroe’.
But critics believe she needs to change tack sharply or risk a downfall. As one source put it bluntly: ‘There is an issue. Women do not think she is cool. It’s just the boobs all the time.’
And it’s not just women who are among her critics.
She is also despised by many young people, having been painted as racist and Right-wing following an advert for clothing company American Eagle last summer, in which she posed alongside the tagline ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans’ – interpreted by some as a troubling reference to her blonde, blue-eyed genetic inheritance.
Sydney, a registered Republican, drew the admiration of President Trump and American Eagle insisted it was simply a reference to jeans.
Some also deem her Zionist because Scooter – who had three children with his first wife – believes in the state of Israel.
My source is not the only person watching Sydney’s progress with a sense of stunned dread.
In the past few months she has reportedly managed to alienate Ari Emanuel, one of the most powerful people in Hollywood.
While between agents, she met with Emanuel, head of talent agency WME who recently parted ways from previous client the Duchess of Sussex. Emanuel apparently advised Sydney that she would be taken more seriously in her career if she ditched Scooter.
She didn’t, and signed with WME’s rivals CAA in September instead. She’s also ditched her long-time publicists for a new firm.
One well-placed associate said: ‘Scooter is definitely moulding her career and, yes, has input over her agent, her film choices and her commercial decisions – all of it. He has been involved in everything. He is blinded by her. His instincts are usually good but not here.’
Another adds: ‘Scooter is obsessed with her.
‘I think she will get pregnant any time now and then all bets will be off. The problem is that she is 29 and he is 45 so they are so mismatched. They are going to end up killing each other. This has disaster written all over it. You can hardly stand to watch.’
Scooter isn’t much good for Sydney’s brand either. Her boyfriend is a man hated by every Taylor Swift fan in the world after a row over him buying the singer’s master recordings.
Swift was so upset by the actions of Braun, a successful music manager, that she denounced him publicly, saying she wasn’t given a fair chance to buy them herself. In response, she rerecorded all the albums afresh.
All of which would be tricky enough for Sydney without adding this week’s off-putting social media activity into the mix, after Sydney posted adverts for her lingerie company SYRN in which she was dressed as a beloved Dr Seuss character Cindy Lou Who from How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
‘Why is she posing as child characters in a lingerie ad?’ one person asked.
From another: ‘Why are we fetishising child characters to sell lingerie?’
‘This woman is disgusting,’ yet another observer responded. ‘This is SO uncomfortable.’
Young people, remember, are the ones who go to the cinema to watch movies. One film producer shares the opinion that she is ‘poison’ to the young.
The actress sparked a global backlash last month after appearing naked aside from strategically placed sports equipment in adverts for the sports betting firm Novig
Sydney appears sure that she is in the process of becoming a cultural icon, with Scooter by her side, steering her to the top as the pair both think she is ‘the next Marilyn Monroe’
You only have to look at how her co-star Zendaya treats her to get an indication of how problematic Sydney Sweeney is.
Zendaya, an icon for the young, took pains not to share the red carpet with her at the premiere of the final season of their hit TV drama Euphoria this April. Promotional activities were undertaken separately and Zendaya never even acknowledged that her co-star was there.
Sydney, meanwhile, sees her aim of becoming the next Marilyn Monroe to lie squarely with ‘baiting’ as much negative reaction as possible from the haters because, in the ‘attention economy’, all it takes to make money is to be talked about.
In a frank interview in 2022, she said: ‘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 added: ‘They don’t pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals. The established stars still get paid, but I have to give 5 per cent to my lawyer, 10 per cent to my agents, 3 per cent or something like that to my business manager. I have to pay my publicist every month, and that’s more than my mortgage. I take deals because I have to.’
It’s worth pointing out that Sydney Sweeney’s background is not one of privilege.
Raised in an outdoorsy, religious and strongly Republican working class family in Spokane, Washington, at the age of 12 Sydney gave her parents Steven and Lisa a Powerpoint presentation to convince them to allow her to follow her acting dreams and they moved to LA the following year along with her younger brother Trent, sharing a room in a motel.
She landed her first role aged 13, but there was no instant change in circumstances. Eventually, her parents split up and her father filed for bankruptcy. In this context it should not be a surprise that success for Sydney is all about money.
When she was a rising star she took on deals which others might have sniffed at, such as the limited edition soap ‘made with her actual bathwater’ for men’s personal grooming brand Dr Squatch.
Fortuitously, in the year after her father’s bankruptcy, Sydney booked the jobs which made her name – Netflix’s comedy series Everything Sucks, The Handmaid’s Tale in which she plays young Handmaid Eden, and her scene-stealing turn in Sharp Objects, an adaptation of a best-selling Gillian Flynn novel. All were broadcast in 2018.
The same year drug drama Euphoria began. From there she has gone on to her current fame, with roles in the White Lotus and the film romcom Anyone But You.
Next up is the film Scandalous, in which she will play actress Kim Novak opposite David Jonsson as Novak’s one time boyfriend Sammy Davis Jr.
She’d like to star in a reboot of the Jane Fonda sci-fi movie Barbarella, and the project is moving forwards at Sony.
Now that she is more established, she’s shown herself happy to cause outrage in return for a few more bucks in the bank.
Last month she sparked a global backlash after appearing naked aside from strategically placed sports equipment in adverts for the sports betting firm Novig. Leading female Olympic athletes lined up to condemn Sydney for sexualising women’s sport.
What they may have missed is that she is a ‘strategic partner’ and equity holder in the company, which incidentally is run by a friend of Scooter’s, so this gig was more than just a one-off pay cheque, it was an endorsement which can make her serious money for years to come. A second advert followed earlier this month.
The two videos have garnered around 100million views on Instagram and the Wall Street Journal reports Novig has raised new funding at a $2billion valuation, a leap of $1.5billion.
But beware the hype.
American Eagle said that their sales grew 1 per cent from the previous quarter after her campaign. However when they brought her back a few months later for a second campaign, sales actually fell by 2 per cent.
So what of her brand SYRN? It started out with a huge bang in January this year.
The whole brand is sold on Sydney’s sex appeal – ‘From the heart, brain and boobs of Sydney Sweeney’ runs the line on its website. On the page, in her own writing, are the words: ‘Nice t**s’ and ‘Nice ass.’
Her team say that the launch generated more than $2million in sales, with the collection selling out within a single day.
Images of Sydney modelling the lingerie caused a sensation.
That’s not the whole story, though. Data from an analytics firm, Winning Hunter, shows that the number of visits to the site cratered over this summer, falling from a peak of 789,000 monthly visits to a low of 140,000.
As a result, the predicted revenue for SYRN is put in the very broad range of $4million to $7million a year.
A source at SYRN said: ‘The brand is tanking even though they are trying to pretend that it isn’t. The lingerie is cheap and ugly, the product is tacky. And she’s not marketing herself to women at all, she is marketing herself to men.’
The source says that Sydney personally drives the art direction of the campaigns – both for SYRN and Novig. The nudity is her idea.
On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea – last month, traffic to SYRN more than doubled, a giant spike apparently driven by the global controversy over the Novig advertising campaign.
When she is at the centre of a global conversation about her body, it seems that the smalls will sell. An insider says that the brand doubled its sales in the third quarter compared to the second, generating more than three times the sales recorded in June.
But insiders anticipate that sales will drop as they did with American Eagle.
The source adds: ‘It’s that one single idea over and over and over. Women don’t like it, and it’s women who buy lingerie, so she is in trouble here.
‘There have been discussions about a rebrand because women do not think she is cool.’
The trouble is, even if you are willing to strip off as often as Sydney Sweeney does, surely you need a dedicated fan base of women – and young people – to keep the money rolling in.
