After a successful year that saw her earn some career-best reviews for her performance in Christy, and scoring a box office hit with The Housemaid, Sydney Sweeney has landed on what’s next. Deadline reports Sweeney will star in an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s classic tragicomedy of manners, Custom of the Country.
Sofia Coppola had attempted an Apple series version of Custom of the Country, which had Florence Pugh attached. Scarlett Johansson was linked to an earlier project, as well. This latest attempt will be a feature film from Mary Queen of Scotts director Josie Rourke, who will also adapt the screenplay.
Sweeney will play Undine Spragg, “a fiercely ambitious woman from the Midwest who strives for the social heights of turn-of-the-century New York. Armed with beauty, daring/hustle and sheer force of will/unwavering ambition, she battles an entrenched elite, fearlessly courting controversy, until love and fortune align.”
Rourke said in a press statement: “Undine Spragg is the original dangerous woman. Edith Wharton’s character has forever fascinated, seduced and infuriated readers. The Custom of the Country was Wharton’s great American novel and Undine Spragg sweeps across America and through Europe at top speed, during a time of immense economic and social change. The book whistles with modernity and as I was writing this adaptation, Sydney Sweeney lived in my head as this iconic character — it’s as if Wharton sat down a century ago and wrote the role for her. I’m thrilled to be working with this luminous actor, Charles Finch, Alison Owen and Studiocanal to bring this novel to the screen.”
Wharton’s novel was published in 1913, and Undine Spragg is still a touchy character for a lot of men out there. Coppola revealed the reason her Apple TV+ series never got off the ground was because Apple execs found that “the idea of an unlikable woman wasn’t their thing.” Scared much, guys?
