Hey, Sydney Sweeney: Kim Novak Thinks You're 'Totally Wrong' to Play Her

Sydney Sweeney’s ambition is her most interesting quality. She’s made no qualms about her desire to be a big star and the careful way she moulds her career to ensure that. It’s a strategy that feels a hell of a lot more skeptical when you consider her recently-uncovered politics and good jeans. Doing an Oscar bait movie about a gay boxer feels a hell of a lot more cynical when you’re a registered Republican, and so does launching a line of bras where every ad for it feels designed to pander to dudes.

One project Sweeney has shepherded for a few years now is a biopic of Kim Novak, the legendary star of Vertigo, and her relationship with Sammy Davis Jr. The pair quietly dated in the ’50s but were forced to end their romance because of racism and Novak’s own boss threatening to attack Davis. This project is Sweeney’s baby. She’s the one who got Colman Domingo, her Euphoria co-star, on board as director. The project, currently titled Scandalous, seems to have stalled. That might be for the best because Kim Novak herself has problems with it.

Last year, she told The Guardian she thought the title was inappropriate. Now, in an interview with The Times, she said that she’d ‘never approved’ the movie and that Sweeney was “totally wrong” to play her. But her reasoning is, uh, weird. “There’s no way it wouldn’t be a sexual relationship because Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time,” Novak said. “She was totally wrong to play me.” Apparently, Sweeney “sticks out so much above the waist”, which is why she would be bad to play Novak. Yikes?

Okay, so let’s give Novak some grace here. She’s 93 and has spent decades away from Hollywood because the industry controlled every aspect of her life and was especially cruel to her and her body. She spent a long time dealing with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and when she turned up at the 2014 Oscars looking different, she was treated appallingly. I get why Novak would be concerned about an actress whose entire thing seems to be male-gaze centred playing her in a movie. As she also said in that interview, she’s concerned that any movie about her and Davis would focus too much on the seeming salaciousness of their romance. The title Scandalous certainly didn’t alleviate her fears.

But it’s also just weird to talk about her like that, right? Maybe she shouldn’t play Novak because she lacks the legend’s enigmatic allure, or because having a MAGA lady try to cash in on someone else’s pain regarding how white supremacy killed her relationship is straight-up icky? In fairness, I don’t think Kim is online so a lot of this has probably passed her by.

This also opens up a big quandary with biopics: what happens when the subject doesn’t want you to make it? Legally, they can’t stop it. See how Olivia de Havilland lost her court case against Ryan Murphy’s Feud. But it will obviously create friction for the creatives. It’s hard to spin your ambition as an act of altruism or respect when the person you’re playing thinks you suck.

Last year, Sweeney told People she was “incredibly honoured” to play Novak and that she related to how “she dealt with Hollywood and scrutiny with her relationships and her own private life and the control of her image.” I doubt Sweeney actually cares what Kim Novak thinks of her little movie idea, but she may be forced to consider the irony of it all.