Sydney Sweeney fans can thank PowerPoint for her Hollywood success
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- Sydney Sweeney says she convinced her parents to move to LA for her acting career with a PowerPoint presentation.
- The "Euphoria" star told Who What Wear that the move was challenging in part due to LA's cost of living.
- Sweeney isn't the only celebrity to use PowerPoint to convince their family to uproot their lives.
Sydney Sweeney says she used a PowerPoint presentation to convince her parents to move to Los Angeles in order to pursue her acting dreams.
The 26-year-old opened up about her career beginnings and recent projects in a Who What Wear interview published on Wednesday.
The actor, who grew up in Spokane, Washington, shared that she had persuaded her parents to move to LA when she was a teenager.
While her parents agreed to her plan, it wasn't an easy journey.
"It was hard because LA is very different from Spokane," Sweeney told Who What Wear. "The cost of a big city versus a small city is vastly different and challenging as well."
According to the latest 2022 estimates from the US Census Bureau, Spokane has a population of around 230,160 people, while LA has a population of over 3.8 million people.
Houses in Spokane have a median listing price of $472,500, as compared to $1.2 million in LA, per the latest data from real-estate platform Realtor.com.
Although Sweeney landed guest roles on popular shows such as "Grey's Anatomy" and "Pretty Little Liars," she didn't get her real break in Hollywood until later.
"My quote, unquote success didn't come until I was in my 20s," she said, adding that her parents didn't really get to experience her success with her because of their divorce.
Despite that, the "Euphoria" star is finally in a position to thank and repay her family for their support.
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"I recently paid off my mom's mortgage," Sweeney said. "As a kid, I always dreamt of being able to take care of my parents, so that was a really big thing for me to be able to do."
This is not the first time that Sweeney has spoken about how she got into acting and how it has affected her family.
In a February 2022 interview with British GQ, Sweeney said she convinced her parents to let her act by writing a five-year business plan that detailed how her career would pan out.
"It said something along the lines of: if she auditioned for X short film, she'd be recruited by agents Y and Z, and then she'd booked this film where she'll meet this well-connected producer, and so on," GQ writer Iana Murray noted in Sweeney's profile.
In July 2022, Sweeney told The Hollywood Reporter that her family had to sleep in a motel when they moved to LA because they were priced out of the housing market.
"We lived in one room. My mom and I shared a bed and my dad and little brother shared a couch," she said.
Sweeney's parents divorced and filed for bankruptcy just as her star was beginning to rise, the "Anyone But You" actor told Variety in an August 2023 interview.
"My parents sacrificed so much to support my dream, and they lost so much during it. I just felt a responsibility to show them that it was worth it," Sweeney told Variety.
Sweeney isn't the only celebrity to pitch her parents about going into acting using PowerPoint; Emma Stone did it too.
Stone told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that she made a presentation titled "Project Hollywood" in ninth grade that included a plan for her and her mom to move to LA where she could audition for shows while being home-schooled.
A representative for Sweeney didn't immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular business hours.