Halsey is coming to the defense of her and co-star Sydney Sweeney’s new film Americanaafter it struggled at the box office.
The movie, directed by first-time filmmaker Tony Tost, earned just $500,000 in its opening weekend, according to The Hollywood Reporter. On Thursday, August 21, Halsey, 30, urged her followers on Instagram Stories to look past the gossip cycle and appreciate the project for what it is.
“You should go see this movie,” she wrote, per E! News, “because @tonytost made an exceptional film, in honor of a genre he knows intimately. Because his work and his vision are greater than the 24 hr gossip tabloid denim bullsh**t. He’s an incredible artist who made a great film with a group of hardworking, talented people. If you love cinema, than you should know that cinema comes first. This is cinema.”
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Halsey also weighed in on the criticism surrounding Sweeney’s recent American Eagle campaign, which some accused of pushing an insensitive play on “jeans/genes.” While the singer acknowledged that “our words are important in this climate,” she pushed back on the backlash being tied to the film itself. “I don’t, however, think that it’s fair for the news cycle to predatorily rip a hardworking director and his hardworking crew for this film that is completely separate-from and unrelated-to a (pretty dumb) advertising take.”
For those out of the loop, the jean campaign starring 27-year-old Sweeney sparked widespread criticism online, with viewers calling the ads overly sexualized and accusing them of pandering to the male gaze. In one video, the actress says, “My body’s composition is determined by my genes. Hey, eyes up here,” as the camera pans across her figure. Additional clips played on the “genes/jeans” pun, including one in which Sweeney notes, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring… My jeans are blue.” The wordplay prompted some social media users to liken the messaging to “Nazi propaganda.”
Meanwhile, American Eagle defended its campaign in an August 1 Instagram statement, clarifying, “‘Sydney Sweeney has great jeans’ is and always was about the jeans. Her jeans. Her story. We’ll continue to celebrate how everyone wears their AE jeans with confidence, their way.”
