She is one of Hollywood’s hottest young rising stars – recently been hailed as evidence for woke culture being in the decline. But now Sydney Sweeney has been fiercely blasted by one of Hollywood’s top female producers.
‘She’s not pretty, she can’t act,’ claims Carol Baum, whose films include Father of the Bride and Buffy the Vampire Slayer
‘She’s not pretty, she can’t act,’ claims Carol Baum, whose films include Father of the Bride and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Baum, speaking with New York Times film critic Janet Maslin before an audience of fans following a screening of her 1988 film Dead Ringers starring Jeremy Irons, held nothing back as she began her critique of the 26-year-old actress.
‘There’s an actress who everybody loves now – Sydney Sweeney.
‘I don’t get Sydney Sweeney. I was watching on the plane Sydney Sweeney’s movie because I wanted to watch it,’ she says about Anyone But You.
‘I wanted to know who she is and why everybody’s talking about her,’ she told Maslin and her audience.
‘I watched this unwatchable movie- sorry to people who love this movie – [this] romantic comedy where they hate each other.’
Sydney Sweeney is one of Hollywood’s hottest young rising stars but she has been fiercely blasted by one of Hollywood’s top female producers
The actress starred in last year’s romcom Anyone But You alongside Glen Powell. Baum Calls it unwatchable!
Referencing the producing class she teaches at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, Baum added: ‘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 but then the question was asked, “Well if you could get your movie made because she was in it, would you do it?”
‘I said, “Well that’s a really good question…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. Your job is to get the movie made.”
Baum has produced 34 films starring the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Michael Douglas and Dolly Parton and last year published a book entitled Creative Producing.
Sweeney, who rose to fame in HBO’s Euphoria, has become one of Hollywood’s hottest prospects, starring in three films in the past six months: Anyone But You, Madame Web and Immaculate.
But she is one of Hollywood’s most talked-about actresses with Baum’s comments typifying the debate raging among Hollywood luminaries over her acting abilities.
Executive producers Lucas Foster, Carol Baum and Jake Gyllenhaal at the premiere of “The Good Girl” at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood in 2002
The blonde bombshell looked absolutely breathtaking as she went braless under an avant-garde white top which resembled a sculpture of hands, flowers, plants, and fruits at the premiere of Neon’s “Immaculate”
Sweeney as Cassie in provocative HBO series Euphoria, which won her an Emmy nomination
Sydney Sweeney, 26, at the Los Angeles premiere of her film Madame Web in February
An article in DailyMail.com last week described how the all-American blue-eyed blonde with corn-fed curves has become a cultural phenomenon, her unashamed sexuality embraced by America’s conservative Right as proof that woke culture is dying, if not already dead.
Hailed by Republicans as the poster girl of a long overdue cultural shift away from political correctness, an incredulous headline in one of Canada’s biggest newspapers, the National Post, asked: ‘Are Sydney Sweeney’s breasts double-D harbingers of the death of woke?’
Sweeney produces her own films and is tipped to star in Marvel blockbuster Spider-Woman as well as being poised to remake Jane Fonda’s brazenly libidinous 1968 sci-fi action movie Barbarella.
Baum’s 1988 film Dead Ringers starred Jeremy Irons and Genevieve Bujold
At the event, held at the Jacob Burns Center in Pleasantville, New York last week, Baum also revealed that while producing 2007 dramatic comedy You Kill Me, starring Ben Kingsley and Tea Leoni, she had to personally intervene to stop Oscar-winning actor Kingsley from ordering the crew to call him ‘Sir Ben.’
New York Times film critic Janet Maslin from her X profilehttps://twitter.com/janetmaslin?lang=en
Kingley was knighted in 2002.
Baum recalled: ‘The crew objected so I called his agent, who is a friend of mine, and I said, “What are we going to do? We have to make him stop him doing it.”
‘Chris Andrews, [Kingsley’s agent], called Ben up and said, “Cut the crap, stop doing this, you’re alienating everybody” and he stopped. And then after the movie was over, he went back to doing it.’
Janet Maslin added she also had a similar experience with Kingsley: ‘He insisted on being called Sir Ben at something and that was just ridiculous but they made me do it anyway.’
Baum has 34 movies to her credit, including iconic films Working Girl and The Shining which she developed as a film executive.
She is married to playwright Tom Baum.
