Sydney Sweeney is giving the people what they want by pretending to love Glen Powell
"We talk all the time like, ‘That’s really funny,'" the Euphoria star said of her rumored affair
2023 may go down in history as the year of the torrid celebrity affair and/or divorce. Ariana Grande and her new beau, the Wicked-ly talented Spongebob Squarepants Ethan Slater, are merely the most recent out-of-wedlock couple to make headlines, but we mustn’t forget about those that came before. 2023 was the year that gave us Scandoval. And a million memes about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Not to mention Taylor Swift and Matty Healy, the short-lived romance of Avril Lavigne and Tyga, and so many divorces.
All of this to say: The People go crazy for celebrities in love—even (especially?) when said celebrities aren’t really supposed to be in love in the first place. And what is an actress like, say, Sydney Sweeney to do but give The People what they want? It’s literally her job! At least, according to Sydney Sweeney explaining away her rumored fling with Anyone But You co-star Glen Powell.
“It’s a rom-com… That’s what people want! Glen and I don’t really care,” she told Variety in a recent, pre-strike interview. And, well, she does have a point. While it might be tempting to argue that the only romance people actually want from their rom-coms is on-screen, recent fervor around Halle Bailey and Jonah Hauer-King’s blue-carpet chemistry and that moment between Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain (not to mention the anti-fervor around those awkward Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher photos) proves otherwise.
To hear Sweeney tell it, despite the pair’s undeniable chemistry and since-denied rumors that the Reality star was the cause of Powell’s split from ex-girlfriend Gigi Paris, the pair are really just good friends. “We have so much fun together, and we respect each other so much; he’s such a hard worker, and I’m a hard worker. We’re excited for the press tour, and I literally just left ADR with him,” she said. “We talk all the time like, ‘That’s really funny.’”
It sounds like, for an actor who has often been subject to misogynistic narratives beyond her control, there’s a certain level of power in actually driving the discourse for once. “They want it… It’s fun to give it to ’em,” she said.