-and-Kim-Novak.jpeg?width=1200&height=800&crop=1200:800 "Kim Novak says Sydney Sweeney is ‘totally wrong’ to play her because she ‘looks sexy all the time’ – UK Times")
Silver screen icon Kim Novak has said she “would never have approved” Sydney Sweeney playing her on film.
The Euphoria star, 28, was set to play the Vertigo actor, 93, in Colman Domingo’s directorial debut, Scandalous!, about the 1957 love affair between Novak and Sammy Davis Jr.
However, progress on the film appears to have stalled.
In a new interview with The Times of London, Novak said she was worried the film would focus on the sexual side of the relationship when the attraction was based on them having “so much in common.”
“There’s no way it wouldn’t be a sexual relationship because Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time,” she told the publication. “She was totally wrong to play me.”
-and-Kim-Novak.jpeg)
Sweeney, Novak said, “sticks out so much above the waist.”
“I would never have approved,” she added.
The Independent has contacted Sweeney’s representatives for comment.
Last year, the younger actor spoke about her eagerness to meet Novak ahead of the project.
“I’m incredibly honored to be bringing Kim to life. I mean, she is such an amazing actress,” she told People.
“I think her story is still very relevant today in that she dealt with Hollywood and scrutiny with her relationships and her own private life and the control of her image. And I think that for me, I relate to it in a lot of different ways.”
Sweeney added, “Once I finish Euphoria, I switch into Scandalous! gear and I’m going to turn my brain into Kim. I’m so excited. I’m like, ‘Oh my God. I’m going to meet Kim Novak.’”
British actor David Jonsson was set to play Davis Jr. in the movie.
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Novak, one of the biggest stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age and the face of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film Vertigo, had a clandestine affair with the Black singer and actor at the height of their careers while Jim Crow segregation laws existed in America.
“I don’t think the relationship was scandalous,” she previously told The Guardian, taking issue with Domingo’s title.
“He’s somebody I really cared about. We had so much in common, including that need to be accepted for who we are and what we do, rather than how we look.”
The pair’s relationship ended after Columbia Pictures boss Harry Cohn, who had Novak signed under a contract, threatened Davis Jr. with mob violence, insisting it would be “bad for business” if Novak were involved with a Black man.
The affair made headlines when a Chicago gossip columnist wrote a detailed account of their relationship in early 1958, including their plans to wed, despite them both denying the claims.
After the news swept the nation, Davis married a Black woman named Loray White nine days later. Novak married a white actor, Richard Johnson, in 1965.
Domingo has described the project as a “beautiful, sweet film that’s really about the possibility of love, but under many eyes”.
He said the film, co-produced by Sweeney, will explore “trying to have privacy, trying to have love, trying to have a life.”
He added: “And I think it’s something that Sydney and I both know very well. We’re trying to advocate for your humanity again in your life.”
