SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers from “America My Dream,” Season 3, Episode 2 of “Euphoria,” now streaming on HBO Max.
A funny thing has happened to Sydney Sweeney since the second season of “Euphoria” aired. She became one of the biggest stars in the world.
She’s not alone in that, among her HBO castmates. Since 2022, when the teen drama signed off for what would become a four-year hiatus, Zendaya has proven herself a reliable anchor for both sophisticated dark comedies like “Challengers” and “The Drama” and blockbusters such as “Dune” and the upcoming “Spider-Man: Brand New Day.” Jacob Elordi, meanwhile, has just this year been nominated for an Oscar for “Frankenstein” and led “Wuthering Heights.” But Sweeney’s fame has had a bit of an edge. And “Euphoria,” now back on the air, isn’t merely allowing the actress to do her best work in years; it’s playing off of the by-now familiar Sweeney image in sharp and intriguing ways.
In the time-jumped third season, Sweeney’s Cassie has gotten what she always wanted. Elordi’s Nate has chosen her, and the two are engaged. Her happily-ever-after, though, comes with complications: In order to finance the dream wedding she believes she deserves — and, possibly, for reasons lying closer to kink than to pragmatism — Cassie has taken up a sideline as an OnlyFans model. Performing for her unseen audience in states of undress and role-playing characters including a subservient dog, Cassie seems, for once, as if she has never, ever been happier.
All of which exists in counterpoint to the past few years of Sweeney’s life in public. Sweeney is unabashed about leveraging her appearance and form both in art and in advertisements; her much-discussed “good jeans” campaign for American Eagle played off of the idea that the viewer is ogling Sweeney, while her deal with soapmaker Dr. Squatch to sell soap purportedly containing her bathwater took the same premise to a certain endpoint. Seizing the means of production for herself and making, rather than merely pitching, a product, Sweeney came up with a line of lingerie — a brand that she wears in her puppy play scene on “Euphoria.”
Observing Sweeney’s career and interviewing her, I’ve been consistently struck by her frank understanding of what Hollywood wants of her, and her ability to deliver it. (In her 2023 Variety cover story, Sweeney said that she asks “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson to amp up Cassie’s mania: “Give me more. I’m going to show you what I have. There’s so much to this girl.”) Up to this point, though, Sweeney’s recent career has been operating on two tracks. In ads, she contorts herself into an object of fantasy; in movies, she’s often disarmingly low-key, particularly in her 2025 offerings. In “The Housemaid,” which turned into a zeitgeist smash over the holidays last year, Sweeney plays a woman who is tamped-down by the script’s design. Her Millie is a meek service employee in the home of two vastly more emotionally labile creatures (played by Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar); when Sweeney finally gets to blow up, late in the film, it’s cathartic, and a reminder of just how much she’s been holding in reserve.
Sweeney similarly cedes the fireworks to basically every other member of the ensemble of last year’s undersung survival drama “Eden”; Ana de Armas and Jude Law get to play grand and operatic emotions while Sweeney’s Margret, a mild-mannered woman of faith, grits her teeth. And Sweeney’s bid for awards attention with the boxing drama “Christy” forewent “Rocky”-style inspiration in favor of a sort of haunted naturalism. Festival-goers responded, but the film proved perhaps too dour for audiences, and for the Academy. Its great triumph may have been as a calling card for the future: Working as an executive producer and freed from the demand to make a crowd-pleaser, this was the kind of work Sweeney wanted to do. The ads, for months prior to “Christy” the headline about Sweeney, were in service of a more interesting project.
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That project continues with a role that, now, brings together Sweeney’s two disparate personas, as actress and as object. And the show that brought Sweeney to fame continues to know just how to use her. Sweeney’s ability to inhabit flatness and quiet, so present in all of her work last year, is a part of the “Euphoria” palette, too: People forget that, after fantasizing about screaming at her friends in the Euphoria High bathroom, Cassie goes eerily silent. It’s this studied blandness that makes Cassie’s emotional eruptions all the more pronounced.
But “Euphoria,” too, is archly aware of Sweeney’s past few years. On the most literal of levels, a woman known for pitching herself as the product playing a camgirl is a joke that lands. But it’s the joy and brio that Sweeney brings to Cassie that bring it to the next level. Cassie struggled through high school with trying to identify her real self; to return once more to the bathroom scene, perhaps the show’s most famous sequence, it’s why she dressed up like an extra from “Oklahoma!” Maybe that could have been the real her — or it was, for a day. Cassie, like so many of us, ultimately defines herself by the way that she is seen.
Sometimes, that definition happens by identifying what Cassie doesn’t want. In the season’s second episode, when her beloved fiancé insists she shut down her OnlyFans, Cassie’s eyes flare with a barely controlled anger, before she catches herself. And earlier in the episode, Cassie’s conversation with Maddy (Alexa Demie) has an explosive charge. Cassie and Maddy had, earlier in the series, been opposing sides of a love triangle, competing for the attentions of Nate; Cassie has notionally won, and is choosing, in conversation with her former friend and rival, to be as magnanimous as she can. She ought to have asked for Maddy’s blessing, Cassie declares, and she regrets it, although her romance was unstoppable. “What Nate and I were feeling for each other was obviously real,” she says over a poolside Aperol spritz. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be getting married.”
Sweeney delivers the line with the kind of naiveté only a shrewd performer can deploy: One can see that Cassie is willing herself to believe this, and casting herself in a grand drama of love and friendship. “I feel like I found the love of my life, at the expense of the other love of my life,” she declares, trailing off theatrically. Yes, Cassie wants to be seen as hot by men who are willing to pay for the privilege; she also wants to be seen as lovable by Maddy. Does Cassie truly believe that she ought to have asked for Maddy’s permission to get married? Well, she wants to be the kind of person who would believe that — and that’s good enough.
This is high-wire acting of a sort that’s less noisy than some of Sweeney’s past “Euphoria” work, although Sweeney and Demie get to some kooky places as their time together on screen goes on. (Cassie, pleading for Maddy’s help to improve her OnlyFans, bugs her eyes as she declares she might be able to become “a big fish in a big pond.”) But it’s crafty and resourceful work by a performer who — unlike the character she’s playing — seems truly to know herself. And it unites, at last, all the ways we see Sweeney into one complicated, compelling package.
From Variety US