Sydney Sweeney appreciates the concern but she can handle her own.
In a recent interview with The Independent, the actress, who plays Cassie Howard in the HBO series, addressed the backlash to the amount of scenes in which she appears naked. "I've never felt like [creator] Sam [Levinson] has pushed it on me or was trying to get a nude scene into an HBO show," she said. "When I didn't want to do it, he didn't make me."
"There are moments where Cassie was supposed to be shirtless and I would tell Sam, ‘I don't really think that's necessary here,'" Sydney added. "He was like, ‘OK, we don't need it.'"
As it turns out, this may be the first project the 24-year-old feels empowered to speak up and voice an opinion. "I've had experiences," she detailed, "where I want to go home and scrub myself completely raw because I feel disgusting."
And while Sydney is willing to appear nude, she does believe that those moments overshadow her talent. "This is something that has bothered me for a while," she said. "I'm very proud of my work in Euphoria. I thought it was a great performance. But no one talks about it because I got naked. I do The White Lotus and all of a sudden critics are paying attention. People are loving me. They're going, ‘Oh my God, what's she doing next?' I was like, ‘Did you not see that in Euphoria? Did you not see that in The Handmaid's Tale?'"
She thinks there's "a stigma against actresses who get naked on screen," adding, "When a guy has a sex scene or shows his body, he still wins awards and gets praise. But the moment a girl does it, it's completely different."
Sydney's been most affected by the way her scenes have been used against her online, revealing that her younger brother was tagged in a photo in which she was naked. "That was the most hurtful thing that anybody could do," she said. "What I do is completely separate from my family. My character is completely separate to me. It's just so disrespectful and distressing."
As for how she copes with the sexualization: "You just get used to it."
Euphoria airs on HBO Sundays at 9 p.m.