Sydney Sweeney had a simple message to share to her haters ahead of Sunday night’s Euphoria series finale.
Sweeney, 28, posted a carousel of photos from her time on the controversial HBO series to her Instagram on Sunday with a three-word caption to sum it all up.
“It’s called... acting,” she wrote.
The MAGA darling came under the microscope last summer after an advertisement campaign she featured in for American Eagle jeans was criticized for “Nazi propaganda.”
Euphoria, the series she has starred in since its debut season aired in 2019, has also received backlash over its third and final season. Sweeney plays Cassie Howard on the teen drama created by showrunner Sam Levinson.
Among the pictures that Sweeney shared in her post were of her in various costumes worn by Cassie throughout the series, including her bridal gown from the third season’s third episode and her infamous dog outfit.
The dog outfit, which Sweeney’s character wore in the season’s first episode as part of her efforts to shoot adult content on OnlyFans, drew scrutiny from real-life sex workers who found the creative choice to be unrealistic.
“It’s very f---ing bizarre that Sam Levinson decided to have every main character in season 3 of Euphoria either become a sex worker or have a job that’s sex work-adjacent,“ Celina Reboyras, a sex worker and founder of Doxy magazine, told Dazed last month. “Like, I went to high school 20 minutes outside of a major metropolitan city in the US and I’m the only person among my peers who became a sex worker.”
“There’s just a lot that’s ridiculous and cartoonish about it,” OnlyFans creator Sydney Leathers told Variety, highlighting that much of what Cassie does on the show would be against the site’s terms and conditions.
“The age-play stuff where she’s dressed as a baby in a diaper, for example,” Leathers said. “Credit card processors have very strict rules that you have to abide by, and the rules are getting stricter all the time.”
“Sex workers in general, myself included, tend to be hyper-sensitive about the way Hollywood portrays us because it’s almost never nice,” Leathers explained. “It’s always absurd or depressing and rarely ever on point. When you’re part of a marginalized community, it’s easy to get upset about certain portrayals of it.”
Levinson, 41, argued that the absurdity of Cassie’s storyline was meant to “break the wall” between the show and its viewers.
“What we wanted to always find is the other layer of absurdity that we’re able to tie into it so that we’re not too inside of her fantasy or illusion—the gag is to jump out, to break the wall,” Levinson said.
Euphoria aired its final episode, titled “In God We Trust,” at 9 p.m. EST on Sunday.
