Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang says that when Sydney Sweeney was getting ready to host earlier this year, she was ready to hear jokes about her appearance.
Yang called Sweeney “an example of a host who came in and understood how she was being consumed and perceived already,” in an interview on the Fly on the Wall podcast.
During her hosting stint on SNL in March, Sweeney, 27, leaned into the incessant chatter when she participated in one skit as a genetically gifted Hooters waitress who rakes in lots of tips despite not being a very good server.
“I always thought that this place was the one place I would feel at home,” Sweeney’s Tina laments in the sketch as she counts her thousands in tips. “I’ve tried to work at other jobs, and I can’t. I worked at an airport — no planes took off. I was a crossing guard; thousands died …,” her character joked.
Online magazine Slate added to the ongoing commentary about her breasts and went viral after author Shannon Palus claimed “they’re not so big.”
“Her boobs are small enough to be held in place beneath a plunging halter top with some professional-grade boob tape, which is not a thing most people with truly large breasts can say,” Palus wrote.
Palus continued by asserting that Sweeney’s breasts being smaller than average, writing, “When it comes to the average breast size, the figure that’s thrown around for American women is 34DD, which is a little bit larger than what people speculate Sweeney’s size to be.”
Even if you didn’t read it, Palus’ subhead summed up Slate’s stance: “If anything, they’re kind of average.”
Slate’s post garnered thousands of likes and comments, and earned a “Community Notes” fact-check on X, which declared simply, “Yes they are,” with a link to Sweeney’s Instagram page.
Yang said that Sweeney was aware of the discourse surrounding her looks and wanted to poke fun at how she is perceived when she was hosting the show. “She came in and was like, ‘Please, everyone, make jokes about my boobs,’” he said. “She was practically begging everybody.”
Sweeney addressed her SNL appearance in an interview with GQ telling the outlet she was in on the joke.
“There’s so many people out there who are like, ‘Oh, she’s famous because she showed her boobs,’” the Euphoria and Anyone But You actress told GQ. “You just learn the system. You can try and fight it but they just fight back. Even if you stand up for yourself, people are going to attack you for standing up for yourself.”
Sweeney might be one of the hottest names in Hollywood, but the new ‘it girl’ found herself the subject of some very unkind remarks in April when a veteran Hollywood producer declared she’s “not pretty” and “can’t act.”
Carol Baum, a film executive who worked on such films as Dead Ringers, Father of the Bride, Fly Away Home and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was speaking at an event alongside New York Times film critic Janet Maslin with the Daily Mail quoting her as saying: “She’s not pretty, she can’t act. Why is she so hot?”
In response, Sweeney fired back at the Hollywood vet calling her remarks “sad.”
“How sad that a woman in the position to share her expertise and experience chooses instead to attack another woman,” a representative for Sweeney tells Entertainment Weekly. “If that’s what she’s learned in her decades in the industry and feels is appropriate to teach to her students, that’s shameful. To unjustly disparage a fellow female producer speaks volumes about Ms. Baum’s character.”