Sydney Sweeney is nervous. The Spokane actor, who broke out with her role in the series “Euphoria,” is backstage at last year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival getting ready to take part in a friendly conversation about her booming career. Turns out, she still gets a bit of stage fright. Before she gets called on, I say she can just imagine she’s speaking to a hometown crowd in Spokane. Her response? That would make her even more nervous.
Since then, Sweeney has been keeping busy. In just the past two years, she’s been in the films “Immaculate,” “Madame Web,” “Americana,” “Eden” and “Echo Valley.” Her latest, the biopic “Christy” (out Thursday at area theaters), sees her stepping into the ring to play real-life boxing legend Christy Martin.
The one thing that’s remained consistent through it all? Sweeney still gets nervous in big moments, especially as she’s gotten more prominent roles to sink her teeth into.
“I’m always anxious around (movies with lots of dialogue) because I want to make sure that I’m getting it all right,” Sweeney said in a recent interview. “But I’m getting better at that.”
Sweeney’s star career began from humble regional roots. She left memorable impressions in small roles in Washington-shot and -set films like Kevin Hamedani’s profoundly silly horror satire “ZMD: Zombies of Mass Destruction” and John Carpenter’s final feature “The Ward.” Then, on the cusp of “Euphoria” fame, Sweeney showed she could take on a more leading role in Lara Gallagher’s underrated 2019 Pacific Northwest thriller “Clementine.”
“There’s something so beautiful about smaller independent films where it’s such a team effort. It doesn’t matter what position you have in it, everybody is helping everybody along,” Sweeney said. “I loved the intimacy of it.”
Though Sweeney has become involved in much bigger projects, it was a smaller film like “Clementine” that helped instill a love of working collaboratively on a production.
“I love being able to be more involved and bring it all together. It’s so fascinating, the business side of it all …,” Sweeney said. “It’s really fun to put together the chessboard and move different pieces around. It’s challenging and I like to challenge myself. I feel like I’m learning something every single day.”
The challenge in “Christy” was as emotional as it was physical. Sweeney, who spent her youth in Spokane playing a variety of sports before beginning to practice kickboxing when traveling back and forth to Los Angeles, said while her previous physical training helped her with the role, getting into the boxer’s state of mind was just as important. In getting to know Martin, a public figure under immense scrutiny, Sweeney said she felt connected with her.
“I love taking somebody who, on the surface or on the page, might feel or look or have been talked about in a certain way and flip it on its head and show people that they need to see something for themselves,” Sweeney said. “I believe that Christy had her own fights within the ring and outside the ring, and I have my own fights within my respective ring and outside my own ring.”
In the case of Martin, her life and the film now dramatizing it become about the domestic violence that nearly killed her. For Sweeney, it was important that the film handle this delicately as she worked with her co-star Ben Foster, who plays Christy’s coach, husband and abuser.
“It’s definitely something that you handle with a lot of care, thought and attention. Having Ben as my scene partner was an added layer to it where I just felt safe and I could trust him,” Sweeney said. “We both don’t like to rehearse. We like to know what the physicality of the scene is and where the cameras are going to be, but then we want to feel and listen and explore within every single scene that we’re in.”
That physicality, rather than pages and pages of dialogue, is what attracts Sweeney to roles, including “Christy.”
“I’ve always believed that the eyes are the window to the soul, and sometimes more can be said without having to say anything at all,” Sweeney said. “I love scenes where I get to just feel.”
Sweeney will next be seen in the thriller “The Housemaid” in December, is reprising her role in “Euphoria” and is set to star in the upcoming film adaptation of video game “Split Fiction” and the recently announced “That Man From Rio” from director Justin Lin. However, she said that she also has always wanted to make another film shot in Washington and hinted that, if the stars align, that could be something to be nervous about in her future, too.
“I’d love to film up there. That’d make me so happy, I think about it all the time,” Sweeney said. “Washington gives you it all! There’s a few that if I can get the correct tax incentives, then it could work up there.”
