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Chloe Fineman is taking responsibility for that Sydney Sweeney Hooters sketch.
The “Saturday Night Live” cast member — who’s known for her stellar impressions — was on Wednesday’s episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade’s “Fly on the Wall” podcast when she said that she gets pretty awkward while pitching sketch ideas, especially “fake” ones that aren’t expected to be taken up.
“I’m the worst at it,” Fineman said about an hour into the episode, before noting that her more harebrained ideas sometimes “do become sketches.”
“The host doesn’t know. They bite on a fake pitch and you go, ‘Uh-oh,’” noted Spade, an “SNL” alum.
“Sydney Sweeney, I pitched her the Hooters idea,” Fineman said of the March 2 sketch in which she and Sweeney both played servers at the restaurant chain.
“We’re counting tips. I get $20 and you’re like, cool, I made, like, $40,000,” Fineman recalled telling the actor. “Then she [Sweeney] DM’d me to write it. And then we got in so much trouble for, like, sexualizing Sydney Sweeney.”
She added in a faux accent, “But it was your pervert over here!”
In the sketch, Sweeney played a new Hooters server who was so attractive that customers couldn’t help but give her preferential treatment and incredibly high tips.
After it aired, the sketch received a fair amount of backlash on X, formerly Twitter, for blatantly focusing on Sweeney’s appearance. People were especially annoyed because the “Euphoria” actor has spoken out in the past about unwanted attention paid to her appearance.
“I was highly sexualized in high school because I had boobs,” she told Elle in 2022. “It’s kind of funny: What was being said about [her character of] Cassie in Euphoria, the public then decided to do to me in real life. Which I thought was so crazy, because we were trying to show a character who was so hypersexualized, and what could have been the cause and effects for her. And they just continue to do it.”
Shortly after her appearance on “SNL,” Variety asked the “Anyone but You” star about online chatter regarding her body.
“I don’t know how to explain it — I’m still trying to figure it out myself,” Sweeney responded. “People feel connected and free to be able to speak about me in whatever way they want, because they believe that I’ve signed my life away. That I’m not on a human level anymore, because I’m an actor. That these characters are for everybody else, but then me as Sydney is not for me anymore. It’s this weird relationship that people have with me that I have no control or say over.”
Although the “White Lotus” alum apparently did reach out to Fineman to write the sketch — and the comedian conceded that it wasn’t her best pitch — some social media users were annoyed by the way the entire “SNL” episode seemed to objectify Sweeney.
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