🎧 Sydney Sweeney on Building a Career on Her Own Terms

The actress is in the Oscar race for her work in ‘Christy.’ She tells me it’s a part she’s unwittingly wanted since she was a kid

PRIZE FIGHTER “I learned and realized so much about myself,” Sydney Sweeney says of playing boxer Christy Martin in the new movie Christy. (Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for SCAD)

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When Sydney Sweeney was a teenager, she balanced her life as an aspiring actress — taking bit parts on Grey’s Anatomy and the 90210 remake — by training in mixed martial arts, a full-contact combat sport that combines various fighting techniques. At the time, the two disciplines didn’t feel connected at all; the sport allowed her a little bit of normal life outside of the whirlwind of Hollywood she experienced as a child actor, something more like what she was used to from her childhood in Spokane, Washington. “Auditioning schedules are all over the place, so you can never really commit to anything, and I really missed having that kind of community,” Sweeney tells me on this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast. “I don’t think that I associated the two (acting and MMA) together.”

Over a decade later, and well into Sweeney’s career as one of the brightest rising stars of her generation, those two passions come together forcefully in Christy, the biopic in which Sweeney plays the trailblazing female boxer Christy Martin. Although her MMA days are behind her, Sweeney, 28, was actively seeking a more physically challenging role even before the Christy script came her way.

“ I had been having meetings with Ronda Rousey (the famed wrestler and MMA fighter) and I was starting to find different sports biopics that I could start to chase,” she remembers now. When Sweeney’s longtime agent, Jennifer Millar from Paradigm, sent her the script for Christy, she was left “blown away.”

“One, because it’s exactly what, as an actor, I was looking forward to,” she says. “And as a person, I couldn’t believe I didn’t know who Christy Martin was. I knew that I had to be a part of making sure people knew who this incredibly inspiring woman is.”

It may be a coincidence that the script for Christy, written by Mirrah Foulkes and with director David Michôd (The Rover, The King) already attached, made it to Sweeney at the exact moment she was ready for it. But the 27-year-old actress and a two-time Emmy nominee for Euphoria and The White Lotus isn’t leaving opportunities like this to chance. Since founding her production company, Fifty-Fifty Films, in 2020, Sweeney has been on a mission to shepherd and develop her own projects and, in her words, “trying out all different types of stories, different genres, and then I can see what I love developing the most.” The results range from her hit rom-com Anyone But You, which Sweeney executive-produced, to this fall, both Christy and the adaptation of the hit book The Housemaid, starring Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried.

Now that she’s producing her own projects, Sweeney says, “ I’m learning so much more. I get to have a seat at the table, and I get to have creative control over different things. I’ve always believed it’s a team sport, and it doesn’t just take one person. I love being able to bring tons of people together.”

Christy marks a significant moment for Sweeney, who still gets emotional when she remembers standing onstage next to the real Christy Martin following the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. She’s got more producing projects on the horizon, and admits that other roles behind the camera, like director, could be next. She’s also still working on ways to maintain a life outside the Hollywood bubble. “I’m watching all my cousins have kids, and seeing how they get to raise them,” she says. “They’re hiking and building treehouses, and they’re in every sport. You see like a 12-year-old there versus a 12-year-old here [in L.A.] and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I want my kids to be kids.’”

But given that she was once a teenager balancing both MMA and auditions for Freeform shows, I wouldn’t bet against her finding a way to do it all.