On Friday, September 5, Sydney Sweeney will arrive at the Toronto International Film Festival, making her first major public appearance since the controversy surrounding her new American Eagle campaign captivated the internet (and Donald Trump). She hasn’t spoken about the divisive ads yet—and tells Vanity Fair that she doesn’t plan to start now. “I am there to support my movie and the people involved in making it, and I’m not there to talk about jeans,” she says. “The movie’s about Christy, and that’s what I’ll be there to talk about.”
That would be Christy Martin, a groundbreaking professional boxer who rose to prominence in the ’90s. The Euphoria star plays Martin, nicknamed “the Coal Miner’s Daughter,” in Christy, which tracks the athlete from her humble beginnings in West Virginia to her ascent as the biggest star female boxer in the world. “I was blown away that her story wasn’t more known on a universal, global level because it’s just one of the most harrowing and inspiring women that I’ve ever met in my entire life,” Sweeney tells Vanity Fair exclusively.
For this career-best performance, Sweeney underwent an intense physical transformation, gaining more than 30 pounds and weathering concussions during her months-long training. She also delivers a knock-out emotional performance as the story takes an unexpected turn after Martin’s relationship with her husband turns violent. Directed by David Michôd, Christy is more than a boxing story—it’s a tale of survival. “One of the things that drew me to this story was the idea of being able to make a movie that starts, in a way, as a beautiful, wild, underdog sports movie,” says Michôd, “but then starts to shift into something that’s really harrowing and, ultimately, deeply moving.”
Michôd, known for The Rover, War Machine, and The King, had made a few movies centering on what he calls “deluded men coming to realize that they’ve been wrong about everything.” He found himself looking to do something different next, ideally about “a woman with a big personality.”
Then he watched a 2021 Netflix documentary about Martin, Untold: Deal With the Devil. He met Martin and realized that her big personality masked hidden layers. “What the world saw was this combative figure,” says Michôd. “But the more we spoke to her, the more we started to realize that there is a really beautiful human there.”
Michôd teamed with Mirrah Foulkes, an actor, writer, and director who is also his partner, to cowrite the script. They researched both boxing and the sort of coercive relationships that stymied Martin. Martin, who had to hide her queer identity for most of her life, married her trainer, James Martin (played by Ben Foster), who controlled both her career and her life.
“I realized that this movie presented an opportunity for me to try and understand how these particular kinds of coercive relationships work. They’ve always been baffling to me,” says Michôd. “It’s true all over the world that these relationships exist in epidemic proportions, and they too often frighteningly end up in partner homicide situations. It’s a global emergency.”
Michôd thought of Sweeney for the role because of the work she’d done in the 2023 film Reality, playing Reality Winner—the NSA analyst who served a felony sentence for releasing government information. Sweeney’s dialogue was pulled directly from FBI transcripts, which made for an acting challenge; coincidentally, Sweeney also had a background in competitive fighting. But most importantly, after talking to Sweeney, he found out how dedicated she would be to the task. “She wanted to do the work. She wanted to train, she wanted to fight, she wanted to transform herself, and we were going to need all of that,” he says.
As a teenager, Sweeney trained in jujitsu, grappling, and a little bit of kickboxing. She had to put those sports aside after Euphoria took off, but she’s always been interested in taking on a more physical role. Though her experience gave her a strong foundation, learning to be one of the best boxers of her time was still a challenge. “My stances and a lot of my technique is different than boxing. You square up differently, and of course you don’t get brought to the ground—everything’s on your feet,” she says.
Sweeney spent three months boxing several hours a day, every day, along with weight training. She also worked with a nutritionist, gaining between 30 and 35 pounds for the role. “I felt very strong and powerful,” she says. “I loved it. Being able to lose myself to become a vessel for somebody else is my dream.”
Because Sweeney wanted Christy’s fight scenes to feel as real as possible, she and the other actors would really hit each other—and she walked away with bruises and concussions. “Every single fight you see, we are actually punching each other. We are going full force,” she says. “I always believed that you would not be able to make it feel real if it’s a stunt double or if it’s faking the hits.”
Foster went just as deep to play Jim Martin, Christy’s controlling husband, who eventually lashes out so violently it almost ends her life. “He is being asked to not just play, but understand and inhabit a kind of an unsavory guy,” says Michôd. “And many movie stars don’t want to do that. It can be tough.” Foster’s portrayal was so eerily real that when the real Christy and her partner, Lisa Holewyne, came to set, they kept their distance from Foster.
Martin spent time with Sweeney and also visited the set—which was nerve-wracking for the actor, at least at first. But the anxiety melted away when Martin watched her do the fight scenes. “She’s cheering you on and she’s yelling, ‘hit him with the hook!’ as if she’s actually watching a fight,” says Sweeney. “And I’m like, ‘Christy, you know what’s going to happen.’ And she goes, ‘Yeah, but I’m still invested in this!’ It was such a fun experience.”
Christy will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Sept. 5. This feature is part of Awards Insider’s exclusive fall film festival coverage, including first looks and exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names set to hit Venice, Telluride, and Toronto.
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