Sydney Sweeney is fed up with people in her profession who tear women down while pretending to build them up — which, according to her, is most of them.
The entertainment industry’s reputation for “women empowering other women” is a facade, Sweeney, 27, said in Vanity Fair’s 2025 Hollywood Issue.
“It’s very disheartening to see women tear other women down,” she said in the interview, published Nov. 13. “Especially when women who are successful in other avenues of their industry see younger talent working really hard — hoping to achieve whatever dreams that they may have — and then trying to bash and discredit any work that they’ve done.”
“This entire industry, all people say is ‘Women empowering other women.’ None of it’s happening,” Sweeney continued. “All of it is fake and a front for all the other s— that they say behind everyone’s back.”
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This false dedication to women’s empowerment, the star said, can be traced back to multiple sources.
“I mean, there’s so many studies and different opinions on the reasoning behind it,” she told Vanity Fair. “I’ve read that our entire lives, we were raised — and it’s a generational problem — to believe only one woman can be at the top. There’s one woman who can get the man. There’s one woman who can be, I don’t know, anything. So then all the others feel like they have to fight each other or take that one woman down instead of being like, Let’s all lift each other up.”
And, as a rising star, the Euphoria actress is “still trying to figure it out” herself, she admitted. “I’m just trying my best over here. Why am I getting attacked?”
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The topic of knocking women in the industry down was raised in the Vanity Fair interview with reference to a producer who publicly criticized Sweeney’s acting abilities and physical appearance earlier this year — which a rep for the star called “shameful” at the time.
As reported by The Daily MailCarol Baum — a veteran Hollywood producer and adjunct professor — discussed this actress at a screening event, stating, “There’s an actress who everybody loves now: Sydney Sweeney. I don’t get Sydney Sweeney.”
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Baum went on to call Sweeney and Glen Powell’s smash-hit rom-com Anyone But You an “unwatchable movie,” before revealing that she asked her students to “explain” the actress to her. “I said to my class, ‘Explain this girl to me. She’s not pretty, she can’t act. Why is she so hot?’ Nobody had an answer,” she said, per Daily Mail.
“But then the question was asked, ‘Well, if you could get your movie made because she was in it, would you do it?’… That’s a very hard question to answer because we all want to get the movie made and who walks away from a green light? Nobody I know,” Baum continued. “Your job is to get the movie made.”
Following the producer’s comments, a representative for Sweeney spoke out. “How sad that a woman in the position to share her expertise and experience chooses instead to attack another woman,” the rep said in a statement to PEOPLE. “If that’s what she’s learned in her decades in the industry and feels is appropriate to teach to her students, that’s shameful.”
“To unjustly disparage a fellow female producer speaks volumes about Ms. Baum’s character,” the statement concluded.
