Sydney Sweeney is defending her controversial bathwater soap, but remaining mum about her American Eagle jeans campaign.
According to the Wall Street Journal, which just published a new interview with Sweeney, the actress “won’t comment” on the uproar over the jeans ad.
However, she did tell the magazine during their sit-down, which took place earlier this summer, that she keeps an eye on what’s being said about her on social media, but she doesn’t let it bother her.
“I think it’s important to have a finger on the pulse of what people are saying, because everything is a conversation with the audience,” she told the Journal in the interview published this week.
The ad in question involved Sweeney in denim for American Eagle, playing on the homophones “jeans” and “genes” that sparked accusations of eugenics.
The ad is part of the company’s “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans” campaign.
In the ad that sparked backlash, Sweeney tells the viewer that genes are “passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.”
“My jeans are blue,” she finishes after the camera has swept up her recumbent body and closes in on her eyes.
The ad has since been removed from the company’s social media pages.
American Eagle released a statement on its social media earlier this month, saying, “‘Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way. Great jeans look good on everyone.”
A rep for Sweeney did not respond to Fox News Digital’s previous requests for comment on the backlash.
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Sweeney also stirred the tub water recently when she made several suggestive ads for Dr. Squatch, a line of natural bath products for men, and collaborated on a limited line of soap made from her own used bathwater.
Sydney’s Bathwater Bliss sold out immediately.
“It was mainly the girls making comments about it, which I thought was really interesting,” she told the Journal. “They all loved the idea of Jacob Elordi’s bathwater,” she added, referencing a racy scene in “Saltburn.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Sweeney told the magazine that in spite of her meteoric rise in Hollywood, she doesn’t consider Los Angeles home.
The 27-year-old “it” girl said she prefers to spend her time at her family’s lake home in Northern Idaho or at her $13.5 million compound with friends in the Florida Keys.
“I try not to be here as much as possible,” she explained, telling the magazine in the interview that she was planning to head to Idaho for the Fourth of July.
Last year, she told Cosmopolitan that most of her friends aren’t in the industry.
“I have a really amazing friend group where there are a few who are in this industry, but most of them are not,” she said last summer. “You get to step out of what I call ‘the bubble,’ and you see what’s important in life. You see reality, and it grounds and humbles you.”
She also said in that interview that she and her friends were spending time at the Idaho lake house in between projects.
“Most of my friends are still my childhood friends, and that’s why most of them aren’t in the industry, because I didn’t grow up in it,” she told Cosmopolitan. “It’s very much just going back to my roots.”
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Sweeney convinced her parents to move to Los Angeles when she was 13, after she had started booking acting parts in the Pacific Northwest.
She told Travel + Leisure last year, “I go home all the time. What’s so beautiful about the Pacific Northwest is everything that you can do outdoors. . . . There are so many mountains and lakes.”
Sweeney remembered going berry picking there as a child. “If you go a little bit north of Spokane, [Washington], right next to the border, there’s like all these hidden little waterfalls.”
Even though she may long for days on the water, Sweeney has made a name for herself as a bit of a workaholic. She’s familiar in both TV and film with shows like “Euphoria” and “The White Lotus” and movies that span horror, rom-com and action, such as “Anyone But You” and “Immaculate.”
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“It’s great to do what you love,” she told the Journal, “because if you love it, then it doesn’t feel like work, and you want to do it every single day, all the time.”
She admitted that her nonstop schedule is the way she wants it. After all, she didn’t become one of Hollywood’s most talked-about celebrities by floating on an inner tube.
She told the Journal she keeps a busy work schedule “because I don’t want to take six months off. I get anxiety thinking about just taking a few days off.”
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“Being on set is my happy place,” she added.
