Madame Web was just another job to Sydney Sweeney
The Anyone But You star isn't bothered by the backlash to her Marvel film
Aux News Sydney Sweeney
Even movie stars have to take shitty jobs to pay the bills every now and again. Sydney Sweeney certainly does—she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2022 that she couldn’t afford to take even a “six-month break” from acting because she didn’t have the funds—although she probably wouldn’t have used the word “shitty” until this past month.
Okay, she’s not explicitly saying it now either, but it’s clearly her attitude towards widely derided tentpole and future cult classic Madame Web, which she was in despite her quip to the contrary (“you definitely did not see me in Madame Web”) last week on Saturday Night Live.
“I was just hired as an actress in it, so I was just along for the ride for whatever was going to happen,” Sweeney told the Los Angeles Times. The film was massively panned by critics (we gave it a “D”) and hasn’t even cracked the $1oo million mark at the box office, a real low point for the once-untouchable franchise.
But while Sweeney, like her co-star Dakota Johnson, hasn’t been shy about critiquing the project—well, she’s been a little more shy than Johnson, but that’s a pretty low bar—there’s another layer to her comment. The Euphoria actor recently began dipping her toes into the production side of things as well; she started her own company, Fifty-Fifty Films, in 2020, and is credited as a producer on her other two major releases from the past four months, rom-com Anyone But You and Catholic horror flick Immaculate, out in theaters March 22. So to say she was just acting in the Marvel blockbuster means a lot more than a clever bit of dissociation.
“I am a very hands-on collaborator. I like being able to give ideas, be a part of it, help come up with solutions. It just changes the whole process,” Sweeney expanded. “It’s so hard for me now to be on a set and not be able to help in any type of way and be able to take action. And being able to actually have a voice and have a valued opinion—it means so much.” Maybe if she was allowed to help out on this particular set she could have saved the day for everyone in the end.
44 Comments
The audience felt the same way.
Okay, she’s not explicitly saying it now either, but it’s clearly her attitude towards widely derided tentpole and future cult classic Madame Web, which she was in despite her quip to the contrary (“you definitely did not see me in Madame Web”) last week on Saturday Night Live.The joke isn’t that Sydney Sweeney didn’t appear in Madame Web. The joke is that nobody saw Madame Web.
You can’t expect these twits to get jokes. Waaaaay to hard for them lol
…and the AV Club hits a new low, when the commentariat has to explain jokes to the writing staff.
Meh, ChatGPT doesn’t understand humor.Yet.
How is this news, or specific to Sweeney? I’m sure all of the actors on set felt the same way.
Slow news day…
I think it’s totally inaccurate to say this is “a real low point for the once-untouchable franchise,” given that the only franchise this could be considered part of is Sony’s Spider-man’s acquaintances without Spider-man himself film universe, which was never untouchable, with at best some people thinking Venom 1 was kind of fun if not good.
Yeah, this line had me scratching my head too. The last time you could call Sony’s Spider-man franchise “untouchable” was like, 20 years ago with Spider-man 2.Since then it’s been mostly awful films with the occasional passable film. I don’t know that anyone would call a franchise that hasn’t been good since 20 years and 2 reboots ago “untouchable”.
It’s baffling to me that they think Kraven, Madame Web, or Morbius could carry a franchise. What’s next? Molten Man movie? Fancy Dan?
It’s because the author didn’t bother to put any thought into the work.
Remember when this site had a real staff and could assign pieces to people that were knowledgeable about that topic?
Venom 1 made 8x the shooting budget, which is a higher ROI than 7 of the 8 Spider-man movies.Venom 2 made 5x the shooting budget. Even Morbius made 2x the shooting budget (though that might not cover the marketing budget).
“Untouchable?”
it’s outgrossed argylle and that’s good enough for me.
Lies!She would jump at the chance to play Spider-Woman in the greatest not Spider-Man Sony epic never produced, Turner D. Century!
I applaud your tenacity.
As long as silly articles are written about silly movies, there will be a need for silly comments.
These posts are consistently the freshest part of the rotting corpse that is this site. Frankly, they should be paying you at least as much as they pay the writers.
What if dudebra doesn’t want Subway coupons?
I think all coupons say they’re redeemable for 1/10 or 1/100 of a cent, so there’s that!
I appreciate that you’re always ready with a Turner D. image. It reminds me of Paul Rudd always showing up on Conan with that Mac and Me clip.
How outrageous that someone can’t take a 6 month break from working.
Right? SO UNFAIR that a movie star can’t just choose to stop working half the year.
I think her point is not that her life is so hard that she can’t take a break, it’s that most people probably assume that actors who are on high profile tv shows or movies are always super rich and *can* take a 6 month break whenever they want, when for the most part actors do have to keep working like “regular” people.
IIRC the context of that quote was talking about streaming residuals. Once upon a time before the days of streaming, even non-super star actors who were part of the main cast of a hit show could count on residuals to cover expenses between seasons, so they didn’t have to worry about needing to line up another job right away, or even just take some time off to recover mentally. But since streaming residuals are basically pennies, regular working actors (which Sweeney was at the time) can’t afford to not be working.
With the context given in the rest of the article, it’s a lot closer to “I’d like to take six months off to try a new career, but couldn’t unless I banked a couple big paychecks”.Still first world problems, not as bad as “thought I’d fuck off for half a year and then realized ramen is expensive”
The context is that actors take (enforced) six month breaks all the time, because there aren’t enough jobs and/or they just don’t get hired for whichever of 10 million reasons. I suspect Sweeney is doing more than okay now, and could weather a six-month cold spell, but in 2022 when she gave that interview and was just gaining prominence it was probably a very different story.
“Even movie stars have to take shitty jobs to pay the bills every now and again.”To be fair, that sounds like eighty percent of Samuel L. Jackson’s career and everybody loves him
For his part, he’s made it clear that he just likes what he does and has said something to the effect of “if you ask me to be in your movie, and I have space in my schedule, I will do it”. Doesn’t seem to be so much that it’s a money grab for him. I guess it’s not too dissimilar to what you’re saying but it feels like a distinction worth making.
People should understand that for the overwhelming majority of actors, most of the roles they play are “just a job” that they aren’t terribly invested in, especially if it’s some franchise IP thing.
I definitely started looking at celebrity differently once I realized that the VAST majority of working actors, even ones whose names or characters you know, are just freelancers worried about lining up their next gig.
It’s that thing that pervades all the arts at a professional level, but especially so in as big an industry as Hollywood film-making: the tension between the calling of creating something that resonates emotionally, and the day-to-day business of making sure the bills are paid. No matter how pragmatic one might be as a working actor, I think there’s always the dream of doing something beautiful with the time you’ve got.
Of course, I think most actors ideally want to do something rich and meaningful, but more often than not they just take what opportunities come up so that they can keep working. I think it would shock a lot of fans – particularly the fans of various sci-fi/fantasy/superhero IPs – just how little the actors they adore care about the material. This is a friend-of-friend thing but I know of one pretty major superhero actor who really does not care for it at all, but he’s professional and doing the job, until the contract is up.
Why is this news? Actors probably know that the movie they’re making isn’t that good, especially when there were a ton of rewrites to the story. At some point they just show up to work, do their best, get paid and go home, just like the rest of us. They don’t have to always take the role that will definitively get them nominated for an Oscar or be career-defining for them, sometimes a job is just a job.I applaud the author’s restraint from writing an entire article about Sweeny without talking about her chest, though.
Wait you think the tits…er…boobies…er…tatas….ACTRESS that’s what I mean, actress! You think she knows what’s going on?
I love to compare the pre-release interviews with the post-release stuff when a movie bombs like this. At one point she said she kept pushing to make the character more like the comic book version. Then when the movie released, it strangely had adult women playing like 14-16 year old high school girls. I’m sure she got paid well and I enjoy her in things but I hope she takes a little bit more ownership of her early career
Both can be true. Her story was that she pushed hard to get that descending-from-the-ceiling-upside-down shot. That is compatible with the characters being badly written & her not being too upset that people didn’t like the film.
You’re surprised by this? Acting: It’s a Job!
I think executives really don’t get it. I am willing to bet if they had done something more interesting, like actually make the Madame Web character in her 60s and disabled and done a really good story about her working as professional medium and it all going wrong they would have had a winner. Instead they got an actress (whose real talent is comedy) but can’t pull off the Chris Evans “normal dude but not boring but also not most interesting character” thing that you need if you are going to make such boring choices and have good side characters. They didn’t even do the most cliche choices correctly.
Anyone But You did good numbers, so I don’t think her career will take much of a hit from this.
Can we please stop calling this a Marvel movie? It’s a Sony movie.