The reactions to her other big release this year, Madame Web – the disastrous, panned Spider-Man spin-off that even Sweeney poked fun at on SNL – are harder to spin into something positive, but when I ask whether the merciless reviews and cruel memes upset her, Sweeney is detached. “The movie is such a large movie with so many people involved,” she says. “I was just hired as an actor and happy to bring to life a character that my little cousins are excited about. There’s no outcome I can control on a film like that, especially when I’m not a producer. You sign up for whatever happens and you take the ride.”
Did she have any sense while making the film that something was off? “No, I mean, there’s definitely a different formula when you’re making a film like that, that was very different from what I’m used to,” she says. Madame Web’s lead, Dakota Johnson, has said that she is unlikely to make anything like it again, but Sweeney, whose character Julia Carpenter is set up as a future Spider-Woman, is more diplomatic. “I think that if the story is right and you have the right team, I would love to.”
Sweeney is frank about the career opportunities that saying yes to a big franchise has given her, even if the film didn’t turn out as she might have hoped. “To me that film was a building block, it’s what allowed me to build a relationship with Sony. Without doing Madame Web I wouldn’t have a relationship with the decision-makers over there,” she says. “Everything in my career I do not just for that story, but strategic business decisions. Because I did that, I was able to sell Anyone But You. I was able to get Barbarella.”
When Sweeney and I met 18 months ago, at a pottery cafe in the suburbs of south Boston, we spoke about her body, and the strange sense of ownership that strangers seemed to claim over it. “My body doesn’t define who I am,” she told me.
I thought about that line during the maddeningly stupid discourse (first on Twitter, then from right-leaning publications courting controversy clicks) about whether her breasts on Saturday Night Live were intended as product placement for ‘the end of woke’. During various sketches, Sweeney riffed on cruel readings of her on social media and on her characters, from a heavily tipped Hooters waitress to a doe-eyed cheerleader in love with, not one of TikTok’s ‘golden retriever boyfriends’, but an actual golden retriever.
Sweeney wanted to use SNL to laugh at what people said about her, joking during her opening monologue that the five-year business plan she presented to her parents to get into acting had a back-up plan: ‘show boobs’. The joke she was making – that her boobs have always been in the background of her master plan – seems by the online reactions to have been lost on much of the audience. As she says, laughing: “There’s so many people out there who are like, ‘Oh, she’s famous because she showed her boobs.”
Sophie Anderson, a UK-based writer, is your guide to the latest trends, viral sensations, and internet phenomena. With a finger on the pulse of digital culture, she explores what’s trending across social media and pop culture, keeping readers in the know about the latest online sensations.
