Sydney Sweeney Gave Everything to ‘Christy’: “We Are Actually Punching Each Other”

On Friday, September 5, Sydney Sweeney will arrive at the Toronto International Film Festival, making her first major public appearance since the controversy surrounding her modern American Eagle campaign captivated the internet (and Donald Trump). She hasn’t spoken about the divisive ads yet—and tells Vanity Fair that she doesn’t plan to start now. “I am there to support my movie and the people involved in making it, and I’m not there to talk about jeans,” she says. “The movie’s about Christy, and that’s what I’ll be there to talk about.”

That would be Christy Martin, a groundbreaking professional boxer who rose to prominence in the ’90s. The Euphoria star plays Martin, nicknamed “the Coal Miner’s Daughter,” in Christy, which tracks the athlete from her humble beginnings in West Virginia to her ascent as the biggest star female boxer in the world. “I was blown away that her story wasn’t more known on a universal, global level because it’s just one of the most harrowing and inspiring women that I’ve ever met in my entire life,” Sweeney tells Vanity Fair exclusively.

For this career-best performance, Sweeney underwent an intense physical transformation, gaining more than 30 pounds and weathering concussions during her months-long training. She also delivers a knock-out emotional performance as the story takes an unexpected turn after Martin’s relationship with her husband turns violent. Directed by David Michôd, Christy is more than a boxing story—it’s a tale of survival. “One of the things that drew me to this story was the idea of being able to make a movie that starts, in a way, as a beautiful, wild, underdog sports movie,” says Michôd, “but then starts to shift into something that’s really harrowing and, ultimately, deeply moving.”

Michôd, known for The Rover, War Machine, and The King, had made a few movies centering on what he calls “deluded men coming to realize that they’ve been wrong about everything.” He found himself looking to do something different next, ideally about “a woman with a big personality.”

Then he watched a 2021 Netflix documentary about Martin, Untold: Deal With the Devil. He met Martin and realized that her large personality masked hidden layers. “What the world saw was this combative figure,” says Michôd. “But the more we spoke to her, the more we started to realize that there is a really beautiful human there.”

Michôd teamed with Mirrah Foulkes, an actor, writer, and director who is also his partner, to cowrite the script. They researched both boxing and the sort of coercive relationships that stymied Martin. Martin, who had to hide her queer identity for most of her life, married her trainer, James Martin (played by Ben Foster), who controlled both her career and her life.

“I realized that this movie presented an opportunity for me to try and understand how these particular kinds of coercive relationships work. They’ve always been baffling to me,” says Michôd. “It’s true all over the world that these relationships exist in epidemic proportions, and they too often frighteningly end up in partner homicide situations. It’s a global emergency.”