It’s fitting that Sydney Sweeney is stationed someplace vacation-worthy. In season one of The White Lotus, her character Olivia—Gen Z angel of disdain—endures a Hawaiian family trip by thumbing through Nietzsche and Lacan. Lately, the actor’s location is similarly cinematic, albeit with less ennui. “I’m in Rome. Rome, Italy,” the Idaho native says on a recent video call, as if dispelling any confusion about the same-named cities in Alabama or Iowa or New York. There’s a rap on her hotel room door. Housekeeping has arrived, which sends Sweeney into gracious-guest mode. “Can you come back later, please?” she says, pivoting back to me with a bright apology. A deadpan voice off-screen issues her fate: “No turndown service tonight, Sydney.”
I joke that I half-expected her to trot out some Italian, given the subject of the afternoon’s conversation. Today, the 25-year-old joins Giorgio Armani as the face of its latest fragrance, My Way Parfum, putting her in the company of such fellow ambassadors Cate Blanchett, Tessa Thompson, and Adria Arjona. “I have only been here for three days now, so I haven’t picked it up yet. But that is my goal,” Sweeney says of her language studies. “I’ve downloaded Duolingo!”
The Armani announcement comes on the heels of a momentous year for the actor, whose performance in Euphoria—playing the determined, shatteringly vulnerable Cassie Howard—earned her one of two Emmy nominations in 2022. (Her work in The White Lotus also got a nod.) If the Nirvana generation seemed to know what teen spirit smelled like, what does Sweeney make of it? “I don’t really think that scent correlates with age,” she muses, shrugging off the idea that demographics shape a perfume—here, a Carlos Benaïm creation that blends iris pallida (powdery, with depth), Indian tuberous (bright and enveloping), Calabrian bergamot oil (for zing), and vanilla (from a sustainable operation in Madagascar). Instead, she says, fragrance is rooted in the “feelings it evokes and the memories that it may bring to you or to others.”
In the case of My Way, which took Sweeney for the first time to Morocco, the campaign shoot delivered on the perfume’s tagline: I am what I live. “I love traveling—it’s one of my favorite things in the whole wide world,” the actor says, her side-parted waves reflecting a buoyancy in her real-life demeanor. “The wanderlust and excitement that you see in my face was truly what I was experiencing in the moment.” Less a Sinatra reference, the name My Way for her speaks to independence. “It means determination and curiosity and adventure,” says Sweeney, whose offbeat hobbies include restoring a cherry-red vintage Bronco. “It means being yourself and not letting anyone get in your path.”
That spirit of self-direction carries over to Sweeney’s current stint in Italy, where she is filming Immaculate, a psychological horror set at a countryside convent. She plays a devout woman headed for an unsettling turn of events; off-camera, Sweeney is a co-producer. Next up: a return to set for Euphoria’s anticipated third season, which will send the actor back into Cassie mode, luminous and fragile. The character’s obsessive beauty regimen was a collective flashpoint last season. “A lot of the tools that were used for her 4 a.m. routine were tools that I brought from home,” Sweeney recounts, singling out the ice roller she took to Rome (handy for depuffing en route to the makeup trailer) and a “floppy” LED mask that has a meditative benefit alongside its purported youth-preserving one. “I find that I can’t see my phone because of the light, so I’m just kind of taking a second for myself.”
While Sweeney professes to be less intense with self-care, she and Cassie do see eye to eye on Armani’s Luminous Silk foundation. “I make all my characters use it because it’s the best—but I also think that she would choose it herself,” the actor says, imagining her alter-ego in Neo Nude blush and a pink shade of Lip Power. Fragrance is another matter. “Cassie definitely wears perfume for others. She will put on whatever she thinks the guy she’s in love with at the time wants her to smell like,” Sweeney says. In a way, that plays out in a tear-strewn scene from season 2 as an overdose of rose—gifts from her clandestine lover. “I loved it because I love floral [scents],” says Sweeney, remembering a current of wind on set that magnified the heady effect. “It was honestly a beautiful, surreal moment.”
