Despite her youth — she celebrated her 26th birthday in September 2023 — Sydney Sweeney has played a surprisingly diverse array of characters. In 2022, Deadline reported she'd signed on to play real-life NSA whistleblower Reality Winner in the HBO biopic "Reality," with the film making its debut the following year.

For Sweeney, playing Winner presented a new challenge that she hadn't faced before: portraying an actual, real-life person, and not just a fictional character created by a screenwriter. "That was one of the reasons I wanted to play Reality, for how different it would be than everything I've done before," she told Little White Lies. As the actor explained, in addition to crafting a compelling performance, she also felt an even greater responsibility weighing on her. "You have to honor the person you're playing as much as possible," she said.

In preparation for the role, Sweeney met with Winner — who was then under house arrest — via Zoom. "I wanted to speak to her prior to prepping on this, one, just to know her as a person, but two, to understand her mannerisms and how she speaks," Sweeney said. Playing a living, breathing person, she noted, was different from her usual process of creating a character's backstory. "So, a lot of it was me learning about her history and her memories, because that's what I love to do with my characters," Sweeney said in an HBO featurette.

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