Sydney Sweeney wanted to be challenged by ‘Reality’: ‘It’s a different muscle playing someone who is real’ [Exclusive Video Interview]

Christopher Rosen
·5 min read
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Few actresses under 30 could claim as much success as Sydney Sweeney over the last two years. Her breakout performance on HBO’s “Euphoria” scored Sweeney a well-deserved Emmy Award nomination for Best Drama Supporting Actress in 2022 – one of two nominations the 25-year-old landed last year (the other being Best Movie/Limited Supporting Actress for “The White Lotus”). That creative recognition has led her to numerous high-profile projects, including a key part in the Spider-man spinoff “Madame Web” opposite Dakota Johnson and a lead role with Glen Powell in the Sony romantic comedy “Anyone But You.”

But the prolific Sweeney – who also maintains numerous brand partnerships and a heavy social media presence as well – had never come across a project like “Reality” before. The new HBO film, co-written and directed by Tina Satter and based on her own play, is about the arrest of NSA whistleblower Reality Winner and unfolds in real-time, taking its dialogue and structure directly from the FBI’s arrest transcript.

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SEE‘Reality’ trailer: Sydney Sweeney stars as Reality Winner in new Max movie [Watch]

“I am always searching for characters that I haven’t done before or challenged me in new ways than previous ones have,” Sweeney tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview. “So when ‘Reality’ came across my table, I was very much drawn to it because of the challenge. And just the script itself. It was just a completely different thing than I’ve ever seen before.”

“Reality” opens with Winner being confronted outside her suburban home by two FBI agents (played by Josh Hamilton and Marchant Davis) and eventually moves to a back room in Winner’s house for the lengthy interrogation scene, which Sweeney estimates comprised almost 60 pages of the economical script. (“Reality” clocks in at under 90 minutes in total running time.) 

“Once we got into that room, we were there and it was basically one scene,” Sweeney explains. “Tina did such an amazing job of flawlessly finding places to be able to cut because we couldn’t film all of that in one day – we filmed the whole movie in 16 days. And so we had 10 to 15 pages per day to film, and you kind of just start to feel the weight and the gravity of the situation as the walls slowly come closer and closer in as you’re filming, because we filmed most of it in order.”

When playing a fictional person like Cassie Howard on “Euphoria,” Sweeney spends months writing lengthy character bibles filled with details that help her understand the person she’s tasked to create onscreen. But for “Reality,” Sweeney adopted a hybrid approach that combined her own creative imagination with actual conversations she had with Winner over Zoom and text message.

“I wanted to find a mixture of the two [research methods] because I wanted to, of course, learn as much as I possibly could about Reality,” she says. “I knew the box within what her life was and her memories, and I wanted as much as I could learn from her. Then I took all of that knowledge, and I put it into my books, and I just expanded it from there so that I had it was more fleshed out.”

Winner was arrested on June 3, 2017, and was sentenced in 2018 to five years and three months in jail for violating the Espionage Act of 1917. She received the longest sentence ever for releasing classified documents to the media but was released from prison in 2021 on account of good behavior. Sweeney says what surprised her about Winner was the former NSA translator’s sense of humor.

“She has quite an interesting sense of humor about herself,” Sweeney says. “So once I learned that, and I got to know her, and I reread the transcript in the script, I saw so much of that in there that I didn’t see before.”

Sweeney says Winner supports “Reality” and her family attended the film’s premiere at the Berlin Film Festival this year, where Satter’s feature premiere to rave reviews for its star. 

“It’s a different muscle playing someone who is real,” Sweeney says of what she’ll take from the film. “I definitely loved that. And I think that I’d really enjoy finding another character that’s based off of a real person and diving into the research on that person.”

“Reality” premieres May 29 at 10 p.m. ET on HBO and will stream on Max.

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