.png)
1 hour ago
5
Sydney Sweeney is everywhere right now.
There she is, near-naked on a billboard in Times Square, strategically covered by footballs and basketballs in a provocative campaign for sports prediction market Novig that has infuriated female athletes.
And there she is again, stripping down to promote the latest collection from her own lingerie company, SYRN — aptly entitled “Birthday Boobs” — which was timed to coincide with her 29th birthday on Sept. 12.
The “Anyone But You” star also found time to turn heads in a sheer gown in Venice for Armani Beauty on Sept. 1.
But amid this relentless, hyper-sexualized exposure — and after leaving her longtime reps at ImPRint PR earlier this month — it’s Sweeney’s relationship with music mogul Scooter Braun, 16 years her senior, that has Hollywood asking: Who is really running the Sydney Sweeney show?
“Sydney absolutely listens to Scooter,” an industry source who knows the couple told Page Six. “And Scooter has absolutely been helping to broker her deals.”
Indeed, we’re told Braun was so smitten with the star, he told anyone who would listen that she was on a real path to win awards for her movie, “Christy,” in which she trained tirelessly and gained over 30 pounds to play the real-life embattled boxer Christy Martin. It was to be her unglamorous breakout moment, à la Charlize Theron’s Oscar-winning turn in “Monster” or Margot Robbie’s Oscar-nominated performance in “I, Tonya.”
Instead, there were no awards, and the movie grossed just $2.3 million worldwide, against an estimated $15 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo.
This week, Page Six Hollywood reported that WME boss Ari Emanuel told Sweeney to dump Braun for the sake of her career in January as she went shopping for new representation after her former manager, Jennifer Millar, moved to Brillstein. (Emanuel denied this.)
Sweeney went on to sign with rival CAA earlier this month, and is now represented by Carrie Gordon at the Lede Company.
Puck’s Matt Belloni reported that Braun, the former manager of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, “inserted himself into the process,” setting up a dinner with CAA bigwig Kevin Huvane. Sources told the outlet that Millar was actually in the loop.
We have reached out to reps for Sweeney and Braun.
But some in Hollywood believe Sweeney has a bigger problem than who represents her.
“To me, she’s taken her fan base for granted,” said the industry source. “Sydney had that rare thing where she’s super pretty, but women still loved her … [But] her lingerie brand is being marketed to men instead of women. From what I hear, SYRN is calling around looking for help from branding experts.”
Sweeney met Braun, 45, who has three children with ex-wife Yael Cohen, at Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez’s lavish Venetian wedding in June 2025, shortly after splitting from fiancé Jonathan Davino.
At first, Braun shrugged off romance rumors, telling friends Sweeney was too young for him, we’re told.
But they soon became serious. On Sweeney’s birthday, Braun posted an emotional Instagram tribute calling her “the woman who is the exception to every rule” and writing that she had shown him what a “true partnership” looks like.
Another friend in Braun’s circle told us he would love her to convert to Judaism, adding, “He definitely got her team all shook up.”
But a Sydney pal disputes that assertion.
“Sydney has had the same group around her for years. Stewart Brookman is the only lawyer she’s ever had. Jennifer Millar was her longtime agent before becoming her manager in November 2025, and Hannah Tenenbaum has been her brand agent from the beginning. Despite some of the chatter, no one on her team is ‘shaken up,’ ” the said.
Yet for all the chatter about Braun’s influence, there is another possibility: Sydney Sweeney is doing exactly what Sydney Sweeney wants.
“She knows exactly what she’s doing and has a long history of baiting audiences to get attention,” Rachel Richardson, writer of the pop culture trends Substack “Highly Flammable,” told Page Six. “Indeed, this has become something of an annual tradition.”
And Sweeney’s appetite for provocation predates Braun.
Last year, she partnered with Dr. Squatch to sell bars of soap made using her bathwater. Sweeney’s Bathwater Bliss crashed the company’s website and the bars later appeared on eBay for thousands of dollars.
Then came American Eagle’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign in July 2025.
The play on “jeans” and “genes” prompted accusations of racial insensitivity, while other critics accused the campaign of catering to the male gaze.
Sweeney later told People she had been shocked by the fallout, saying, “Anyone who knows me knows that I’m always trying to bring people together. I’m against hate and divisiveness.”
But she didn’t stop provoking, and now there is the Novig campaign.
CEO Jacob Fortinsky said this week that Sweeney herself drove much of the creative direction behind the controversial campaign after approaching the company about an equity partnership.
“It really was Sydney who was driving a lot of the visuals and the messaging,” he said.
The results were deliberately impossible to ignore.
The campaign features Sweeney posing mostly naked with strategically placed sports equipment while repeatedly saying the word “sports.”
While the ads garnered a lot of attention, not all of it was positive as they left female athletes incensed.
Former US gymnast Gracie Kramer responded by posting footage of herself online competing with the caption: “idk what Sydney Sweeney was doing, but this is what a woman in sports looks like.”
International rugby player Sofie Fella, meanwhile, called the campaign “disrespectful” to women who have spent years trying to separate female athletic achievement from expectations about their appearance.
“Instead of paying female athletes properly or instead of putting it into the women’s sports economy, we’re spending money making ads like this?” she said.
As with her American Eagle ad, Sweeney did not back down.
Instead, she responded on Instagram with photographs of celebrated sportswomen, including Serena Williams, who have themselves posed nude.
“At every turn Sweeney could have retreated,” Richardson said. “And yet here she is again almost naked, promoting a sports prediction site.
“The idea that control over Sweeney’s image is masterminded by anyone but her is wild to me. Her love of provocation predates her relationship with Braun and can be seen even in her early acting role choices.
“It also suggests that she’s not smart enough to own her own image, which is deeply insulting given her enormous success on TV and in movies.”
And there is little doubt that Sydney Sweeney is a business.
SYRN launched with Sweeney dangling a chain of bras from the Hollywood sign and is backed by investment firm Coatue Management, which has had $1 billion in funding from Jeff Bezos and Dell CEO Michael Dell.
Increasingly, she appears interested in owning a piece of what she sells rather than simply banking an endorsement check. She has also served as a producer on several of her movies, including “Christy” and the more successful “Anyone But You” and “The Housemaid,” via her production company, Fifty-Fifty films.
She’s clearly doing something right. “Anyone But You,” opposite Glen Powell, became a surprise global hit, taking more than $210 million worldwide, while 2025 psychological thriller “The Housemaid” grossed nearly $400 million worldwide — meaning she’s starred in two of the very few low-budget breakout hits of the past three years.
She will return in the sequel, “The Housemaid’s Secret,” out in December. She’s also starring in an animated Netflix film, “Gundam,” and is preparing to produce and star in “Hollow,” made by Margot Robbie’s production company, Lucky Chap.
Additionally, she stars in a new adaptation, out next year, of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, “Custom of the Country,” where she plays social climber Undine Spragg.
The actress, who grew up in Spokane, Wash., “has been in charge of her own career from the beginning,” said an insider familiar with the star.
“The decisions she makes are hers. She has built her career through her own instincts and work ethic.”
The insider added, “There is a double standard in questioning whether a man is somehow directing her career. If the roles were reversed, I’m not sure anyone would ask who was ‘in charge’ of a successful male actor’s career or attribute his decisions to the woman he was dating.”
Major brands still want her. CAA fought to represent her. And the Novig uproar has achieved advertising’s most basic objective: Everyone is talking about Sydney Sweeney.
The question now isn’t simply who is running the Sydney Sweeney show. Increasingly, the answer appears to be Sweeney herself.
The issue is whether she can keep turning controversy into commerce before ubiquity becomes overexposure — and whether the female audience that helped make her a star will keep coming along for the ride.
As for Braun — and perhaps the whole high-wire act — the industry source said: “I don’t know if this is going to end well.”
Bengali (BD) · 
English (US) ·