Sydney Sweeney owes a lot of her fame to HBO, but her best HBO series, Sharp Objects, is her most underrated. The 28-year-old actress became a household name with the controversial teen drama series Euphoria, in which she plays the hyper-sexualized teenager, Cassie Howard. She also gained recognition for her role as Olivia Mossbacher in the cast of The White Lotus season 1.
Both shows earned Sweeney Primetime Emmy nominations, and she's leveraged her Hollywood clout into a prolific film career. Though 2025 saw the actress release a string of theatrical flops, she finished the year strong with Sweeney's The Housemaid becoming a huge box office success. Though Sweeney is a controversial figure off-camera, she is an incredibly talented actress, as she proved in Sharp Objects.
What Is Sharp Objects About?
Based on Gillian Flynn's 2006 novel of the same name, Sharp Objects features a career-best performance from Amy Adams as Camille Preaker, a very troubled crime reporter. Camille engages in compulsive acts of self-harm, and when we first meet her in the bingeable HBO series, she's being discharged from a psychiatric hospital.
Upon returning to her hometown of Wind Gap, Missouri to investigate the murders of two local teenage girls, Camille moves back into her childhood home. Being under the same roof as her toxic and manipulative socialite mother, Adora (Patricia Clarkson), is an emotional pressure cooker for Camille, who is forced to open old wounds as she confronts the past — and the fact that the murderer may be closer to home than she thought.
Though much of the critical acclaim went to Adams and Clarkson, who earned Emmy nominations for their performances — and deservedly so — the younger actresses in the cast held their own opposite these seasoned screen veterans. Eliza Scanlen gives a haunting turn as Camille's disturbed half-sister, Amma, while Sweeney steals the show in every scene she's in.
Sharp Objects Played A Formative Role In Sydney Sweeney's Career
In Sharp Objects, Sydney Sweeney plays Alice, Camille's roommate at the psychiatric hospital. At just 16 years old, Alice is significantly younger than the 30-year-old Camille. Their age gap divides them at first, but soon, Alice and Camille form a sisterly relationship, which makes it all the more devastating for Camille when Alice takes her own life.
Alice's role is much bigger in the Sharp Objects miniseries than it is in the book, where her tragic circumstances are confined to a single paragraph. In the show, she's given an entire storyline. It's one told through flashback, which risked slowing down Camille's present-day, more intense storyline. However, thanks to Sweeney's arresting performance, Alice is an emotional anchor just as pivotal to the plot as the murder investigation.
Prior to Sharp Objects, Sweeney's most substantial credit was the short-lived teen comedy series Everything Sucks!, which had its dramatic moments but was much lighter in tone than the HBO thriller series. However, through Sharp Objects and The Handmaid's Tale, which Sweeney appeared in at around the same time, the actress showed her astonishing talent for tackling dark material, and showcasing the broken souls of the characters she plays.
Sweeney put this on full display as Cassie Howard, the Euphoria character with the biggest risk of coming across as one-note. Though she was more comedic in The White Lotus, Sweeney's dark sensibilities were a perfect match for the twisted, unsettling tone of the show. Furthermore, her most favorably reviewed movies — Immaculate, Christy, and The Housemaid — all share the haunted DNA of her Sharp Objects performance.
Sharp Objects Is HBO’s Best & Most Underrated Thriller
Sharp Objects was brought to HBO by a creative dream team of writer Gillian Flynn, creator Marti Noxon, and director Jean-Marc Vallée. Noxon was the showrunner for Buffy the Vampire Slayer seasons 6 and 7, and while season 6, in particular, was criticized as being too dark, that tone was perfect for Sharp Objects, especially with regard to its female characters.
Meanwhile, Vallée is known for helming another HBO thriller series, the much more famous Big Little Lies. In both shows, Vallée gives masterful atmospheric direction. Just like Big Little Lies' affluent coastal community was a character in and of itself, the heavy Southern Gothic setting of Sharp Objects ratcheted up the tension, as viewers could almost feel themselves choking on the Missouri heat.
The show is an engrossing, slow-burn character study of the main characters' psychological damage. This ultimately makes Sharp Objects' killer reveal and the final, shocking twist all the more impactful than if the series simply hit the familiar beats of a fast-paced whodunit.
Though Sharp Objects received plenty of marketing from HBO, and was a hit with critics, it didn't make its mark on pop culture the way it should have. This may be because the popularity of domestic thrillers, which were all the rage in the 2010s, was starting to wane by the time Sharp Objects came along at the end of the decade in 2018.
This is a shame because, besides being an excellent domestic thriller, Sharp Objects is a quintessential domestic noir. Everything about the HBO miniseries screams "darkness," whether it's the suffocating mansion that is Camille's home or Sydney Sweeney's electrifying performance. It's the kind of show you'll instantly recommend to your friends, though its disturbing images will haunt you long after the credits roll.
- Directors
- Jean-Marc Vallée
- Writers
- Scott Brown, Alex Metcalf, Ariella Blejer, Dawn Kamoche, Gillian Flynn
- Creator(s)
- Marti Noxon
