Reality winner Sydney Sweeney to play whistleblower Reality Winner

Inspired by Tina Satter’s play ‌Is This A Room, the film will star Sweeney, Josh Hamilton, and Marchánt Davis

By Matt Schimkowitz | June 8, 2022 | 9:55pm

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Reality winner Sydney Sweeney to play whistleblower Reality Winner

Sydney Sweeney Photo: Rich Polk (Getty Images for MTV)

Sydney Sweeney’s star is currently going super nova. After landing on three of HBO’s biggest and buzziest shows of the last five years and a role in the most-anticipated Marvel movie to date, Madame Web, Sweeney has been picking up real-world Ws across the board. She even did that whole hiding in a tub meme, and, according to Twitter, she bravely brought back the low-rise skirt, the two marks of success in this dog-eat-dog world. So it only seems fitting that she would play Reality Winner, the embattled and convicted whistleblower currently serving a five-year sentence.

Winner’s story isn’t nearly as fun as her name. In 2017, Winner, then an American intelligence specialist, leaked information regarding Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Later that year, she was arrested for suspicion of stealing a classified NSA document about Russia’s meddling and offering it to the news site The Intercept, which published the report. An audit of Winner’s desk computer revealed that she had been in contact with the outlet.

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She was formally charged “with removing classified material from a government facility and mailing it to a news outlet and pled guilty to the charge, receiving the longest sentence ever given for leaking information to the press. Clearly, the United States government wasn’t too keen on its citizens knowing that Russia threw the whole election into upheaval via a phishing scam. Can you really blame them? This entire thing was very embarrassing for the government and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta.

Anyway, now Sweeney’s going to play her, leaving behind her days as a disaffected and at-risk teen in Sharp Objects, White Lotus, and Euphoria.

Inspired by her play Is This A Room, Obie-winner Tina Satter will co-write and direct. On stage, Is This A Room uses the 65-minute transcript of the FBI’s interrogation of Winner as the basis for the script, using pink lighting cues to indicate redactions from the transcript.

[via Deadline]