Hollywood’s newest occupant of a tired old stereotype
Photo via numero.com.
Hollywood has historically struggled with portraying female characters and actresses. Women are often forced into harmful stereotypes, and few stereotypes are more infamous than the blonde bombshell or bimbo. The phrase brings to mind a young up-and-coming actress with dyed blonde hair and big boobs who provides a production with ‘sex value’, often overlooking the actresses’ talent and humanity.
The original blonde bombshell, Marilyn Monroe, is still to this day more famous for her looks than her impressive acting career that spanned from the 1940s until her death in 1962. Another example is Vancouver Island’s own Pamela Anderson, who was dehumanised in her role as C.J. Parker in Baywatch which exploited her ‘sex appeal’ (not to mention the scandal surrounding her private leaked sex tape).
Sydney Sweeney seems to be the industry’s recent occupant of this role. Though her treatment in Hollywood has been better than her previous blonde bombshell counterparts, the core issues of the stereotype still prevail. Audiences and media overly focus on her body, giving her less complex characters, and then reducing any skill that she does display in these roles as sheer luck rather than skill.
Sweeney had her breakout role as Cassie Howard in HBO’s Euphoria, playing a young love-stricken teenager struggling with her relationships, family issues, self-esteem, and mental health. In more recent years, she has also taken on producer roles in movies such as the 2024 film Immaculate and Anyone but You. However, like many a blonde bombshell before her, if you look at the press coverage of these projects, there is a focus on Sweeney’s body that sexualizes her unnecessarily instead of highlighting her acting abilities and the deeper meaning behind the projects or characters.
This sexualization is also innate in many of the roles she plays. In Euphoria, the writers use Sweeney’s character almost exclusively to explore sexual plot lines. She struggles with the way that men seem to only view her in a sexually explicit manner, with a scene in the first season pointing out that once she hit puberty even men in her own family responded to her body differently. This objectification led to exploitation by others in her life, including partners leaking her nudes when she was underage.
The sexualization of this teenage character is unsettling. Euphoria dangerously walks the line between telling Cassie’s story and using the character as a sexual object, placing her in multiple nude scenes and compromising outfits. In an interview with the Independent in 2022, Sweeney revealed that showrunner Sam Levinson reportedly had even more nude scenes planned that didn’t appear in the final show. Sweeney was able to request that her character wore clothes for some of these scenes, but having seen the final product of season two, it’s hard to fathom that there was more unnecessarily nudity in the original script.
Throughout the show there is continued nudity from many characters, but Sweeney receives the most nude scenes. Other characters get incredibly vulnerable moments where their humanity is explored without it being directly tied to their sexual relationships, but Sweeney’s almost always can be traced back to sexual relationships.
This depiction of her character continuously naked sets Sweeney up to be the next blonde bombshell, at a personal cost. Sweeney recently commented in a Variety article that she “can’t allow [herself] to have a reaction” to the politicization and public discussion of her body. Additionally she adds that people think she’s “not on a human level” when they discuss her body.
The blonde bombshell role is clearly negatively affecting Sweeney, beyond just holding her back at work. How could it not? No human being should have their body scrutinized and talents overshined by a low cut top.
This sexualization of Sweeney extends beyond her portrayal in Euphoria. She recently hosted Saturday Night Live to promote her new movie Madame Web. During her opening monologue, she made jokes about her fanbase being predominantly male, clearly referring to her body as the reason. It’s the kind of joke that’s been done a million times over, and it wasn’t from an interesting new angle. So why could SNL, a show filled with some of America’s best comics, not come up with anything original for Sweeney to say?
The blonde bombshell has been done. How many other women are we going to put through the same treatment before we allow them to be seen for more than just their bodies? Hopefully Sweeney’s new movie, Immaculate, paves the way for a more complex portrayal of this rising star, and for the audience to view her for the skill she displays and not just her body.
