If Sydney Sweeney was a Taylor Swift song, she would be “Mastermind.”

The actress engineered — and even encouraged — the affair rumors about herself and Glen Powell while they were making Anyone But You, a romantic-comedy with low box office expectations that ended up grossing over $200 million worldwide. “I was on every call. I was in text group chats. I was probably keeping everybody over at Sony marketing and distribution awake at night because I couldn’t stop with ideas,” Sweeney told the New York Times last month. “I wanted to make sure that we were actively having a conversation with the audience as we were promoting this film, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones who created the entire narrative.”

Powell further discussed Sweeney’s marketing prowess with Vanity Fair.

“We leaned into the chemistry, we leaned into the fun, we leaned into all of it — and the movie benefited. The fun part with Syd was figuring out what’s going to be noisy and sticky. People talk about TikTok as a thing that is cannibalizing the theaters, and what we saw is that they feed into each other: It becomes more eventized and more fun,” he said. “Glen, the person, would not have been comfortable with that a year and a half ago. Now I can put myself in a different place and be a character.”

Powell’s upcoming characters include an undercover hitman in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man; a yee-haw tornado chaser in Twisters; and more likely than not, the return of “Hangman” in a third Top Gun movie.

Anyone But You is streaming on Netflix.

(Via Vanity Fair)