Every time you feel down about Britain’s out-of-touch elites, a look across the Atlantic is a reassuring reminder that it could be worse. Hollywood, in particular, seems incapable of learning lessons. The highlight for me was when various actors tried to comfort people during the pandemic by recording a butchered version of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ from their California mansions. As if the worst song ever written wasn’t already bad enough.
Such political tone-deafness has become such a stock trope of Hollywood that it has been lampooned at length, most brilliantly by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone in Team America: World Police (2004). ‘As actors it is our responsibility to read the newspapers and then say what we read on television like it’s our own opinion,’ solemnly intones a puppet Janeane Garofalo at a meeting of the Film Actors Guild (F.A.G.). Film stars would be wise to follow the advice of Ricky Gervais, who, when he hosted the Golden Globes, banned them from bringing up any pet causes during their acceptance speeches: ‘Thank your agent, thank your God, and then fuck off.’
Yet satire hasn’t seemed to jolt celebrities into realising their essential ludicrousness. Reheated talking-points remain their preferred form of intervention. Given the widespread Hollywood aversion to independent thought, there’s an element of contagion here. One standard-issue opinion on Donald Trump or gender or the Middle East quickly spreads through interviews and on social media. If nothing else, the predictability is tiresome.
Enter Sydney Sweeney. The actress, known for her roles in Euphoria and The White Lotus, attracted some controversy – and an approving post on Truth Social from Trump – for her viral American Eagle advert earlier this year. The ad featured Sweeney looking ravishing in various denim outfits, alongside the tagline ‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans’. This caused a meltdown among terminally online progressives who accused her of hawking not just moderately priced denim, but eugenics and white supremacy.
When asked about the ad last week in a filmed interview with US GQ features director Kat Stoeffel, Sweeney knocked the entire Hollywood industry of ‘beautiful people recycle one-dimensional political thoughts’ on its head. The interviewer constantly tried to goad her into saying something about Trump’s approving comments and she refused to do so. She remained polite but not effusive. It was a striking contrast to most Hollywood comms, which are so often simultaneously enthusiastic and deeply insincere.
Sweeney declined to take the bait: ‘When I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.’ By stating that celebrities don’t actually have to opine on everything, she has expressed a radical idea for Hollywood: ‘I always think that I’m not here to tell people what to think, I’m just here to open their eyes to different ideas. This is why I gravitate towards characters and stories that are complicated,’ she continued, by which point the interviewer was looking at her like she was an alien life form. Finally, she introduced the thing to which the activist left are most allergic: a sense of perspective. ‘I did a jean ad. I love jeans.’
She seems to have cracked that the trick is not to engage and never to apologise
Undoubtedly, part of the appeal of Sweeney is that she revels in this simplicity. She knows she has an epoch-defining rack and is proud of it. Which raises the question: when were the last era-defining breasts? Pamela Anderson in Baywatch? Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot? Jane Russell in The Outlaw (the film which gave us the term ‘cleavage’ in relation to breasts)? Sweeney certainly seems aware of her place in the pap Pantheon; she once recreated, with the actress Maude Apatow, the famous photo of Sophia Loren casting a sideways glance at Jayne Mansfield’s pneumatic cleavage.
Yet there is more to Sweeney than just apple-pie good looks. She comes across as grounded, down-to-earth. Crucially, she seems to have cracked that when faced with someone determined to bait you on a political issue, the best solution is to be polite but firm. The trick is not to engage and never to apologise – it’s the apology that gets you, every time. Her refusal to play ball breaks the progressive lie that everything must be political. Looking for white supremacy every-where is, frankly, exhausting. You can just tap out of a world of overreaction, intrusion and perpetual bad faith.
Not that this is easy, for even silence can provide evidence of ‘wrongthink’. Sweeney faced criticism after sharing photos and videos from her mother’s birthday party in 2022. Fans spotted people in the background of some shots wearing MAGA-style hats (not even actual ones, but spoofs which said ‘Make Sixty Great Again’). This was apparently enough to damn her. During the Black Lives Matter mania in 2020 – perhaps the high watermark of progressive overreach – a common social media refrain was that failure to condemn George Floyd’s death publicly meant then you could safely be assumed to be racist. Some people were sacked for not showing enough support for the cause.
All this comes with a word of caution to the right – we actually don’t know what Sydney Sweeney thinks. Conservatives should not repeat the left’s mistake of assuming people agree with them on everything.
Yet Sweeney’s example should benefit those of us who are keen to hear less from celebrities. There are promising signs that we’ve moved past peak celeb. The actress Jennifer Lawrence, who once told Vogue that a Trump victory would be the ‘end of the world’, recently said that she’s decided she’s no longer going to speak about politics in interviews, because she’s realised celebrities wield zero influence on elections.
Doubtless there will be a few death throes of the movement, but let us face them in the spirit of the great Sydney – with an eyebrow raised and breasts to the front.
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