Some actors approach their careers with sniperlike precision. But the team steering Sydney Sweeney has adopted the scattershot approach of a blunderbuss.
The 27-year-old has been an inescapable newsmaker over the past year, keeping the online discourse machine in constant churn. An abridged list of her recent exploits includes starring in an American Eagle ad accused of promoting eugenics, selling 5,000 bars of soap infused with her bath water, stirring speculation over her political leanings, and dating the controversial music manager Scooter Braun.
Sweeney’s ubiquity as a pop-cultural flashpoint tends to overshadow the fact that she is a charismatic, capable performer who once earned two Emmy nominations in the same year, for “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus.” But lately, she has also adopted a flood-the-zone strategy with her acting career, following a big hit in “Anyone but You” with the dire “Madame Web,” back-to-back box-office flops “Eden” and “Americana,” and the Apple TV movie “Echo Valley,” which you didn’t know existed until this paragraph.
Though she inarguably remains one of the most famous young women in the world, Sweeney has a tough battle ahead if she wants to be seen more as an actress than a celebrity. Fortunately, there is hope on the horizon: The new film “Christy,” which debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival on Friday, stars Sweeney in a physically transformative role as the professional boxer Christy Martin. The through-the-roof reaction at the premiere suggests that Sweeney could contend this Oscar season. But is it too late for an effective career rebrand?
Directed by David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”), the film begins with Christy as a young West Virginian who discovers an unexpected talent for fighting: Whenever she flattens an opponent in the ring, Christy is almost stunned by her own power. “I think I found my thing,” she tells her girlfriend (Jess Gabor), though to advance in the sport, she’s steered away from her lesbian relationship and into the controlling clutches of the trainer Jim Martin (Ben Foster), who proposes marriage.
“No one wants to see a butch girl fight,” insists Jim, who pressures Christy to wear pink, molds her into a pliant wife, and cuts her off from friends and family. Under his thumb, Christy rises to become the world’s top female boxer, though Jim ensures that everything she accrues is under his control. As Christy tries to summon the courage to leave him, he manipulates and belittles her, eventually lashing out with startling violence.
This may sound like a grim slog but because Sweeney proves so empathetic a screen presence, the film played as a crowd-pleaser at its Toronto premiere. The audience burst into applause when Christy landed her first punch, gasped as her relationship with Jim turned abusive, and even talked back to the screen during Christy’s showdowns with her chillingly homophobic mother (Merritt Wever). I’d even say it’s the current front-runner for the People’s Choice Award, which is voted on by Toronto festivalgoers and typically proves that a film has the populist power to make a deep awards-season run.
But can Sweeney overcome all her controversies to become a bona-fide best-actress contender? She’s certainly pulling from the right playbook: Just as Charlize Theron (“Monster”) and Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”) proved they were more than just pretty faces by playing real-life women marked by hardship, Sweeney has thrown herself into this de-glammed performance, packing on 30 pounds of muscle and spending months on fight and weight training to become a credible pugilist.
Still, it isn’t easy to rebrand as a serious actress when your offscreen antics make so much noise that even the president is moved to weigh in. The upstart distributor Black Bear will release “Christy” on Nov. 7 and plans to mount a major awards campaign on Sweeney’s behalf, but if she can’t pare back and prove choosier about her career path, Oscar voters may dismiss her as a dilettante and favor proven names like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone.
That said, there’s a clear narrative here that Sweeney and her team can work with. As she took the stage in Toronto to a standing ovation, a tearful Sweeney was joined by the real-life woman she plays, Christy Salters (previously Martin), who praised the power of her transformation.
“She got to be this totally different person that none of you expected,” Salters said. “She wasn’t the beautiful, sexy Sydney — she was the tough, rugged Christy in this movie, and I think it’s awesome.”
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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