Sydney Sweeney covers one of GQ’s Men of the Year December covers – she’s GQ’s Woman of the Year, basically. Love her or hate her, you can’t deny that she had a huge breakout year and she was in the middle of several pop culture/political stories. Her American Eagle jeans ads went viral for their eugenics-y vibe (“Sydney Sweeney has good jeans/genes”) and then JD Vance used Sydney as a symbol for Why Democrats Are Bad, and then Donald Trump even commented on Sydney favorably. Add to all of that, it turns out she’s a registered Republican. Oh, and she scored like a dozen other side-gigs, and she’s promoting a potential awards-bait movie with Christy, and she produced and stars in The Housemaid. You can read Sydney’s GQ profile here. A lot of it is about the American Eagle stuff! Some highlights:
Christy & The Housemaid are both about domestic violence to varying degrees, and Sydney works with domestic-violence charities: “It does [mean something to me]. I always speak out about something that is important to me. And for me to speak out, I use art. Through my characters in my movies, it’s a way for me to be able to do my part and spread awareness in different ways through my characters. That’s how I’ve always learned to communicate, and it’s really important.
Being swept into political conversations: “I’ve always believed that I’m not here to tell people what to think. I’m just here to kind of open their eyes to different ideas. That’s why I gravitate towards characters and stories that are complicated and are maybe morally questionable, and characters that are—on the page—hard to like, but then you find the humanity underneath them.
She’s single: “I’m single. I don’t think I’m looking for a man right now. What I’ve learned this year is that I have a really, really amazing group of girlfriends and I am strong and independent and that I’m going to be okay. If love finds me, love finds me. I’m a hopeless romantic, so I hope love finds me, but I’m not the type of person that wants to go out all the time. And I do believe in true love and wanting to be with someone for the rest of my life. So I’m not going to…you won’t see me jumping around a lot of places…[like] guys.”
She’s not trying to narrate anything about her private life for public consumption: “The professional benefits for me of being private is for my own health and sanity. I think that if I let everybody in all the time, I have nothing for myself. I’m just a 28-year-old woman who’s trying to figure it out, and I’m still learning and I’m going to make mistakes and I’m going to grow. And I think that it’s important to be able to do that without having to say every single thing all the time. I mean, I’ll vent to my girlfriends. But other than that, no. I know who I am. I know what I value. I know that I’m a kind person. I know that I love a lot, and I know that I’m just excited to see what happens next. And so I don’t really let other people define who I am.”
The American Eagle ad: “I did a jean ad. I mean, the reaction definitely was a surprise, but I love jeans. All I wear are jeans. I’m literally in jeans and a T-shirt every day of my life.
How it felt when Vance & Trump defended her: “It was surreal…I kind of just put my phone away. I was filming every day. I’m filming Euphoria, so I’m working 16-hour days and I don’t really bring my phone on set, so I work and then I go home and I go to sleep. So I didn’t really see a lot of it.
Whether she wants to clarify anything about eugenics: “I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear.”
I sort of feel the same way about Sydney’s fakakta jeans ads that I feel about the outrage-cycle over Bad Bunny as the Halftime performer. They were both twenty million dumb scandals ago, and the outrage simply cannot be sustained. Were Sydney’s ads really dumb and offensive? Yes. Were they offensive on purpose, to create a controversy? Also yes. And all of these months later, I don’t blame Sydney for shrugging it off either – if she is what I think she is (a MAGA Republican), then she’s keeping silent on purpose, to play footsie with the authoritarian fascists without ever confirming that she’s one of them. It’s literally the only thing that makes sense, given her behavior.
Sydney Sweeney on the reaction to her American Eagle campaign: “It was surreal.” https://t.co/nXrhkNTGcz pic.twitter.com/deqbdN9bD5
— GQ Magazine (@GQMagazine) November 4, 2025
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of GQ.
