Sydney Sweeney Finally Addresses That Controversial Ad as Donald Trump Weighs In

Remember that Sydney Sweeney jeans ad that somehow turned a denim pun into a national discourse and a stock-market bump? She finally talked about it, and the whole thing is even stranger when you lay it out.

How a pun turned into a problem

American Eagle tapped Sweeney for its Fall 2025 denim campaign with the tagline: 'Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.' Cute, right? Online, not so much. Because Sweeney is blonde with blue eyes, a bunch of TikTok users read the pun as a wink at 'genes,' and suddenly the ad was being accused of promoting eugenics and white supremacy. Yes, off a jeans pun.

Sweeney on the backlash

In a new GQ profile, Sweeney says the uproar blindsided her. She kept it simple: she likes jeans, she wears jeans, end of story. The reaction was a surprise, but not something that shook her.

'I knew at the end of the day what that ad was for, and it was great jeans, it didn’t affect me one way or the other.'

Then a former president got involved

The ad got so loud that Donald Trump weighed in back in August. After hearing about Sweeney’s voter registration, he pivoted to cheerleading the spot, saying: 'She’s a registered Republican? Oh, now I love her ad,' per CNN. Sweeney called that whole moment 'surreal.'

How she dodged the noise

While the internet was spiraling, Sweeney was working. She says she basically parked her phone. She was shooting Euphoria, doing 16-hour days, and doesn’t bring her phone to set. So she mostly missed the play-by-play while it was happening.

Meanwhile, American Eagle cashed in

For all the outrage, American Eagle’s stock price jumped nearly 40% after the ad went public. Sweeney clocked that the numbers were moving and figured a lot of the backlash was, well, just talk.

What she’s doing next

Sweeney is out promoting Christy, a boxing biopic that lands in theaters on November 7, 2025.