As an actor and producer, Sweeney says she just wants to try new things

Sydney Sweeney is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in Hollywood, and for the past few years she's mostly done so through offbeat, unconventional, wildly entertaining films. Ahead of the release of her latest film, the nun-horror Immaculate, Polygon spoke with Sweeney about how she chooses her projects and what it means to act in them versus produce them.

According to Sweeney, her process for choosing scripts and projects is simple: it has to scare her. When thinking about scripts, she explains, "If something scares me in a challenging way, then that's what I should do."

It didn't hurt that Immaculate scared her for more reasons than the feeling that it was a challenging role. She first auditioned for the film a decade ago, when she was 16 – long before Euphoria skyrocketed her fame. Sweeney says Immaculate was "very different" when she first auditioned for it, but it stuck with her. So when she created her own production company, Fifty-Fifty Films, and began thinking about how to weaponize her love of horror movies for her next project, she immediately wanted to track down the script that still scared her all these years later. When she found out Immaculate was still unproduced, she says she had to jump at the chance.