Sydney Sweeney’s newest movie is a flop, and her fellow celebs aren’t holding back their feelings about the controversial star’s box office numbers.
Sweeney’s starring turn as lesbian boxer Christy Martin in the biopic Christy opened to $1.3 million this weekend, making it one of the worst US starts ever for a movie opening in more than 2,000 theaters.
In the wake of her box office bomb and her recent controversies, some stars didn’t hold back in their criticism of the 28-year-old Euphoria actress.
Sweeney has been a lightning rod for months now, ever since her controversial American Eagle ad, which featured the blond, blue-eyed, white star making a double entendre with “great jeans,” and “great genes.”
After the fierce backlash to the perceived racism of the ad, it was revealed that Sweeney registered as a Republican prior to the 2024 election, and she did a widely criticized interview with GQ, where she was given the opportunity to push back against white supremacy and refused to engage.
“I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear,” she said.
Prior to Christy tanking, Republicans started singing Sweeney’s praises, but other stars have been vocal critics of the actress, with SZA liking a scathing post about her, Aimee Lee Wood commenting a throwing up emoji on Sweeney’s GQ interview, and Christina Ricci commenting “100%” on a video by content creator Jupiter Baal criticizing the interview.
Now, other celebs are hitting back against Sweeney and her poor box office showing. For Sweeney’s part, she’s happy that she made a film about the true story of Martin’s resiliency after she was nearly beaten to death by her husband, who was ultimately convicted of her attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
“We don’t always just make art for numbers, we make it for impact,” Sweeney captioned a lengthy Instagram post. “And Christy has been the most impactful project of my life.”
But what did her fellow celebs have to say?
Ruby Rose
Via Threads @rubyrose
Orange is the New Black star Ruby Rose wrote a scathing post on Threads, criticizing the film for hiring a straight actress to play the main character and admitting that she was originally attached to play Christy, before ripping into Sweeney for pretending to be queer and calling her a “cretin.”
“For her PR to talk about it flopping and saying SS did it for the ‘people,” Rose wrote. “None of ‘the people’ want to see someone who hates them, parading around pretending to be us. You’re a cretin and you ruined the film. Period. Christy deserved better.”
Jon Stewart
from Fauxmoi
During one of his signature Daily Show rants, host Jon Stewart lampooned Christy and made fun of people’s shock that her new conservative fans didn’t run to the theater to watch a movie about an out lesbian boxer.
“The new Sydney Sweeney movie, box office bupkis,” Stewart said. “Apparently, her new MAGA fan base didn’t show up in droves to see a biopic about a lesbian professional boxer who overcomes domestic violence to live her truth. Who could have seen that coming?”
Dan Stevens
While Dan Stevens didn’t call out her poor box office numbers specifically, after the movie flopped, the Downton Abbey star shared a post on his Instagram Stories calling out Sweeney for her GQ interview.
“Sydney Sweeney’s GQ interview is a reminder that ‘not having a stance’ on white supremacy is 100 percent having a stance on white supremacy,” the post reads.
Whether Christy’s poor ticket sales are a reflection of Sweeney no longer being box office gold in the light of her controversial career choices, or a reflection of audiences sadly not being interested in the story of a lesbian athlete, these stars are taking the opportunity to hit back against Sweeney.
11 times J.K. Rowling did something wildly transphobic, ranked
J.K. Rowling attends day four of Royal Ascot at Ascot Racecourse on June 20, 2025 in Ascot, England.
This story originally appeared on Out.
For almost a decade now, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has been spreading transphobia and has become the poster child for the UK’s troubling movement of TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). She has gone on transphobic tirades on social media, written a nearly 4,000-word anti-trans manifesto, donated some of her fortune to anti-trans causes, regularly misgenders trans women, and gleefully celebrates every time the transgender community has their rights stripped away.
The author, once revered for creating an inclusive fantasy world where good triumphs over evil, let her LGBTQ+ fans down by consistently doubling down on her transphobic rhetoric. She has painted trans women as predators who are lying about their gender to take away women’s rights and enter women’s spaces under false pretenses. This dangerous vitriol has even caused many of the stars of the Harry Potter franchise to come forward and call her out for her anti-trans takes.
For queer and trans fans of Harry Potter, this abrupt turn was jarring and has undermined their love of a fictional world where marginalized groups are loved and fought for. But Rowling hasn’t just disappointed her fans by spreading her hateful views; she’s also done so in some of the most bizarre ways, leaving many people not just outraged, but scratching their heads.
11. Tone deaf Dolly Parton tribute
Rowling joined the world in mourning Dolly Parton by posting a tribute on X that backfired when the country music legend’s fans came out in droves to point out that Parton loved the LGBTQ+ community and wouldn’t have supported Rowling’s TERF views.
After Parton fans flooded Rowling’s comment section with messages like, “She certainly would have thought of you as a nasty, hateful woman. Nice little tweet though,” Rowling attempted to hit back after a user called her “a fucking monster” by posting, “Well, joke’s on you, because neither of us want Jolene to take our man.”
10. Accidentally wrote “f*ck up some TERFs” on a child’s drawing
Seemingly by mistake, Rowling replied to post on X about a nine-year-old kid’s drawing of Ickabog, a monster from her children’s book, by including text she likely meant to copy and paste elsewhere.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f*** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”
Internet sleuths figured out that in the post, Rowling was misgendering Tara Wolf, a trans woman accused of assaulting Maria MacLachlan, who was at an anti-trans protest in 2017.
9. Accused Olympic boxer Imane Khelif of being trans
When Algerian boxer Imane Khelif took home gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics, Rowling joined fellow wealthy bigot Elon Musk in spreading the rumor that the cisgender boxer was secretly a man, leaning hard into the ever-present transphobia and anti-intersex hate in women's sports.
Even after both Rowling and Musk were named in a criminal complaint filed with French authorities over alleged “acts of aggravated cyber harassment,” Rowling refused to let it go and continued to post anti-trans posts accusing Khelif of lying about her gender.
8. Transvestigated another athlete
Less than five months after harassing Olympic boxer Imane Khelif for supposedly being trans, Rowling joined in on another transvestigation of a woman in sports when she accused cisgender Zambian soccer player Barbra Banda of secretly being a man — she is not.
Rowling took exception to the BBC naming Banda the 2024 Women’s Footballer of the Year. “Presumably the BBC decided this was more time efficient than going door to door to spit directly in women's faces," Rowling wrote on X.
7. Smoked a cigar to celebrate being a TERF
After donating £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 to help them fight against a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women, Rowling celebrated in a ghoulish way when the U.K. Supreme Court decided that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the court decision by posting a photo of herself with a drink in one hand and smoking a cigar with the other. While people like right-wing commentator Megyn Kelly commented “God bless you,” the post was also full of people slamming her for her cruelty in the face of people having their rights taken away. Pedro Pascal even called her out for doing “Voldemort villain s---" and referred to Rowling as a "heinous loser."
6. Accidentally turned herself into a meme
Rowling accidentally turned herself into a meme when she changed her profile pic on X to a photo that showed what looked like black mold-covered walls inside her mansion.
While the photo most likely shows wallpaper and not mold, users ran with it and began joking that the black mold had infected her brain as an explanation for her hateful anti-trans views.
5. Whined about being doxxed
On the eve of Transgender Day of Remembrance in 2021, comedian Holly Stars, actor Georgia Frost and drag king Richard Energy protested Rowling’s anti-trans views by staging a demonstration and posting a photo holding signs in front of the author’s home near Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rowling took exception to her house numbers being visible in the photo and accused the “actor activists” of “doxxing” her in an eight-tweet rant on X. But is it doxxing if the information is already public? Rowling claimed she received “so many death threats I could paper the house with them,” but both of her residences are historical landmarks, and one even has its own Wikipedia page.
4. Wrote a transphobic character that sounds an awful lot like herself
Under her pen name Robert Galbraith, Rowling wrote The Ink Black Heart, where a character gets harassed and doxxed because of their transphobic and racist views.
Rowling claimed that the character wasn’t based on her own experience, despite Rolling Stone writing that the character is doxxed “with photos of her home plastered on the internet” and subjected “to death and rape threats for having an opinion,” which probably sounds pretty familiar to people who have been following the author’s anti-trans outbursts.
3. Called David Tennant the "gender Taliban"
Rowling called Harry Potter actor David Tennant and people like him the “gender Taliban” in a post on X after he spoke out at the British LGBT Awards, where he called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon” and said they are on the “wrong side of history.”
In response, Rowling leaned into hateful anti-trans rhetoric that conflates being transgender with being an abuser of women. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.
2. Dared police to arrest her
Rowling spoke out against Scotland’s new hate crime act in 2024 by daring police to arrest her for misgendering trans women. The act criminalizes “stirring up hatred” regarding age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, transgender identity and variations in sex characteristics, which can result in a fine or a seven-year prison sentence.
Rowling then went on a lengthy tirade on X — something she is known for at this point — where she accused lawmakers of protecting trans women at the expense of “the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls.” She finished by telling the police to come and arrest her if what she wrote “qualifies as an offense” under the new law. “I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment,” she wrote.
1. Posted an upskirt photo
Rowling, who claims to be a protector of women and rails against trans women being allowed in women’s restrooms, targeted a transgender British podcaster who she disagrees with by posting an upskirt photo of her. Freda Wallace became Rowling’s latest target when she refused to engage with the transphobe online.
Rowling responded by misgendering Wallace and posting a photo of her originally taken by anti-trans activist and fellow transphobe Maya Forstater, from slightly below Wallace to show her upper thigh. Rowling said that Wallace refused to debate her but to prove she has “no hard feelings” she posted the photo of another debate. “I hear he left an indelible impression on the audience. And the chair,” Rowling wrote.