Sydney Sweeney, since her breakout role on HBO’s “Euphoria,” has strived to prove that she has much more to offer than her looks.

The “White Lotus” actor has in recent years diversified its portfolio to showcase her acting skills and flex her muscles like a producer with the films “Immaculate” and “Anyone but You”. Despite her efforts, the 27-year-old star says, she feels that Hollywood’s outward support for female creators — particularly from other women with established careers — is only lip service.

“This whole industry, everyone says, ‘Women empower other women.’ None of this is happening,” she said Vanity Fair in an interview published Wednesday. “It’s all fake and it’s a front for everyone else, what they say behind everyone’s back.”

Sweeney, founder of Fifty-Fifty Films, called out Tinseltown’s alleged fake feminism a few months after “Father of the Bride” producer Carol Baum. rejected his star power.

Speaking in April at a New York screening of her 1988 film “Dead Ringers,” Baum said: “(Sweeney) isn’t pretty, she can’t act. Why is she so sexy? Sweeney’s team quickly fired back, lamenting “that a woman in a position to share her expertise and experience would instead choose to attack another woman.”

“If this is what (Baum) has learned over her decades in the industry and feels is appropriate to teach to her students, that is shameful,” a spokesperson for Sweeney told the Times in April. “Unfairly denigrating a fellow producer says a lot about Ms. Baum’s character.”

Baum would have regretted his remarks, but the pain clearly remained for Sweeney.

“It’s very disheartening to see women destroying other women, especially when women who are successful in other areas of their industry see young talent working very hard,” Sweeney said in Vanity Fair’s 2025 Hollywood issue. .

This sense of competition and tendency to discredit and exclude other women might be a feature of Hollywood and not a bug, Sweeney said. While it may be a “generational issue,” she says, women have grown up believing that only one woman can succeed, whether she manages to get the man or climb the ladder. . “There’s only one woman who can be, I don’t know, anything,” she added.

Sweeney, who did not refer to Baum by name, told the magazine that she was simply doing her best to continue to make a name for herself. Yet she asked, “Why am I being attacked?”

Years before Baum’s insult, the two-time Emmy nominee spoke candidly about her journey to Hollywood, recounting The Times in 2022 that it had been far from easy. For a while, she said, she was “fighting, fighting, fighting (for jobs).” When she began acting as a teenager, the stress of growing up also came with the pressure of the industry.

“When you’re 16 and you don’t really like yourself, and you’re trying to figure out what’s going on with your body and your makeup and your hormones, and people are telling you that you’re not good enough – this weight is so heavy, ” Sweeney said at the time.

Although Sweeney doesn’t feel supported by other women in Hollywood, she told the Times that she could count on her parents “who, no matter what, believed in me.”

Times staff writer Nardine Saad contributed to this report.