Sydney Sweeney, one of Hollywood’s reigning it girls at the moment, has done everything from prestige TV (Euphoria, The White Lotus) to rom-coms (Anyone But You) and indie dramas (Reality) in addition to making a very entertaining go at hosting Saturday Night Live earlier this month. The release of her newest feature film Immaculate, meanwhile, is just days away — and it finds the blonde starlet tackling perhaps her most ambitious project yet, one that reportedly pushed her to her limits both physically and emotionally.
Set to hit theaters on March 22, Immaculate (from director Michael Mohan, who also worked with Sweeney on projects including Prime Video’s super-erotic The Voyeuers) finds Sweeney portraying an American nun who’s searching for peace and refuge at a remote convent in the beautiful Italian countryside. Shortly after her arrival, she becomes pregnant. It’s an “immaculate” conception reminiscent of the Virgin Mary’s that soon turns the nun’s warm welcome into a horrific nightmare.
Sweeney was an executive producer on Immaculate in addition to being the star, which only further illustrates how far she’s come in a relatively short amount of time — and which also undercuts the way some of her fans see her as mere eye candy. For the new movie, which adds a creepy and blood-splattered horror project to her ever-expanding resume, Sweeney brought on Mohan and also polished the Immaculate script herself.
On set, there were times she’d be covered in “blood” while clutching a script and setting up new shots while moving various pieces of the production around. And things get going fast in the movie; one reviewer has argued that the stomach-churning two-minute opening of the film might be Sweeney’s finest moment on screen to-date.
“What’s so cool is that there are so many different themes and points of conversation for people to draw their own conclusions or assumptions,” Sweeney said in an interview. “That’s what I love — when a film doesn’t try to drive one message into an audience’s mind and tell them, ‘This is what you need to believe.'”
