Sydney Sweeney Spends Hundred of Dollars to Prep for Each Role
Though Sydney Sweeney has been acting for over a decade, she’s been particularly booked and busy since 2018. The 25-year-old has been able to balance multiple roles for TV shows and movies alike. Sweeney is mostly known for her dramatic roles, such as Cassie Howard in Euphoria and Eden Blaine in The Handmaid’s Tale. However, in 2021, she added comedy to her wheelhouse by portraying Olivia Mossbacher in The White Lotus. But just how does Sweeney prepare for such drastically different roles?
Sydney Sweeney does tons of preparation for every role she takes on
Sweeney has always been extremely meticulous about her preparation process. After receiving advice from an acting mentor, the Washington native started understanding the importance of keeping her characters separate from her. And because she doesn’t want to be pigeonholed as an actor, the Sharp Objects alum fights to make all of her roles distinct from one another.
The Emmy-nominated actor builds a book for each of her characters
But just how does Sweeney flush out her characters? For each of her roles, she creates a book. Likening it to a character bible, the book is filled to the brim with details about the person she’s portraying. While speaking with Story + Rain, Sweeney described her process. “I create books to build the characters that I play,” she shared. “I create an interactive timeline, journal, diary of their entire lives from the day they were born to the first page of the script.”
Sweeney spends hundreds of dollars on the materials for each of her character books
The intricate process is certainly time-consuming. It’s also a fairly expensive process. Shortly after Sweeney learns that she booked a role, she heads to the craft chain store, Michaels, to purchase all the materials that she needs in order to build her character bible. “I spend a couple of hundred dollars at Michaels!” Sweeney admitted. “I buy a book, decorate the whole thing, and write tons of stuff down.”
What kind of information is in the books that Sweeney builds for each role?
But what are the things that Sweeney is writing down? While she incorporates the script, she also takes care to fill in every detail for her character. “There are sections to each book,” the producer explained. “There’s the timeline of her whole life, a section for her relationships, her memories, what her world looks like. And I have a section for where the script starts. I believe that when a character is in a scene, she’s still living. So I have a section for what happens between every scene.”
Clearly, Sweeney’s process is extremely thorough. But considering the praise she’s been receiving lately, the detailed building of her characters is paying off. Certainly, the return on her financial investment for her character books is quite high.
