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Sydney Sweeney and The King of the Summer Movie Season

Sydney Sweeney and The King of the Summer Movie Season

Actor Paul Walter Hauser and writer/director Tony Tost pay homage to the rest of the country in their neo-western Americana

In the last month, Paul Walter Hauser only took a week off from the summer box office. His stint as Mole Man in The Fantastic Four: First Steps was front and center in the #1 movie in the world when he appeared in the universally loved reboot of The Naked Gun as the straight man to a self-lampooning Liam Neeson. Now, the actor who broke out as wrongfully accused security guard Richard Jewell in Clint Eastwood’s 2019 biopic has made his return to drama playing opposite Sydney Sweeney and the pop singer Halsey in Americana.

The directorial debut of Longmire and Poker Face writer Tony Tost, Americana centers on a small South Dakota town shaken by a scramble for a Native American ceremonial shirt when a corrupt antiquities dealer (Simon Rex)’s plans to acquire it go awry. In the mix to take the prize are a single mom (Halsey) to a kid who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull (Gavin Maddox Bergman), her smalltime gangster boyfriend (Eric Dane), and the leader of the local Rez (Zahn McClarnon) who wants to reclaim it for his tribe. 

But the film’s core is Hauser’s Lefty Ledbetter, a lonely, unlucky cowboy who just wants to share his life–hopefully with Sweeney’s stuttering waitress as they aim to use the proceeds from the shirt to fund her Nashville stardom.

Americana is so good that one is able to fully shake off Sweeney’s recent unintentional and unwarranted conscription into the culture war. Yet, as remarkable as her performance is, her chemistry with Hauser and Tost’s deft writing are strong enough to make the movie endure far longer than what’s up in the Twittersphere. 

Hauser and Tost set down with The Pamphleteer to talk about the rise of the neo-western, smalltown stories, and country music’s evergreen power.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Your movie and Eddington have been the best films I've seen this year by far. Why do you think it is that the contemporary western has suddenly had a renaissance this summer? 

Hauser: Movies are weird. We shot this in 2022. It came out in 2023 at South by Southwest. Now, it’s coming out in 2025, so I don't know if it’s really timed in any way purposefully or culturally. But I do think it’s a genre or subgenre that we will probably see more of. The world feels a little wild west lately, like people are making up their own rules and sort of going after their American dream with great and risky gusto.

Tost: I think there’s something to the Western, whether traditional or neo-western, that’s just really malleable. High Noon and Rio Bravo were kind of receptacles for some anxieties in the 50s. Or you could talk about The Wild Bunch in the late 60s, early 70s. In the same way, you can go back into this hyper American storytelling form and kind of carry whatever’s in the air with you. The same way five plus years ago Hell or High Water was a neo-western that I think really hit some juicy topics in its own way.

Neither of you are from major cities. Paul is from the Midwest and Tony spent time in the Ozarks. How did your backgrounds in, I hate the term, but flyover country, add to the incredible nuance that this movie has in representing a very dynamic sense of place outside of the coastal cities?

Tost: For me, it’s my default setting. If I’m left alone to dream up a story, it’s going to be in a small town or, you know, quote, unquote “flyover space,” because that’s my natural habitat. That’s the life experience I’ll draw from. It takes a bigger leap for me to set something in LA or New York, where I feel a little bit more like a tourist. 

I feel like smalltown America gets looked down on or gets editorialized before it has a real chance. I try to, because that’s where I'm from, still see with some clarity, and not have some built-in prejudices that maybe other filmmakers might have.

Paul, it seems relevant for you too as you were creating the character of Lefty. Were there any experiences that you drew upon before you came to Hollywood?

Hauser: Things being a bit simpler, and there’s no connotation with the word simple. I mean it by definition. Things were simpler in a small town in Michigan where you weren’t trying to go to a James Beard award-winning restaurant and you were super satisfied with the local diner. You weren’t overly ambitious with your time. You worked a job so you could afford to do your Friday night with your friends or your Saturday night, and then your Sunday with your family and have Sunday dinner and watch the football game. 

There’s an earnestness and a simplicity that I recognize for sure. I think in my 20s especially, I didn’t want simple anymore. I wanted some sort of adventure in an urban setting with more ambitious and flashy things. Now I find myself 15 years later, at 38 years old, and all I want to do is simple. All I want to do is slow stuff down and not be as ambitious in a lot of ways or as busy. I’ve kind of come full circle.

Speaking of busy, you are in all three of the last movies that I've seen. It’s Paul Walter Hauser summer. How do you go about crafting such different characters? You're working a lot.

And Tony, for you, what was it like working with Paul? How did you all collaborate on Lefty Ledbetter, who is, in a lot of ways, kind of the masculine soul of this movie?

Hauser: When I choose roles, I try to choose things I haven’t totally done before. If there is some overlap, and it feels like something I’ve done once or twice, I’ll just try to add some sort of layer to it. 

I think with Lefty Ledbetter, he is written as equal parts quirky and realistic. And we’ve met people who are quirky yet grounded and real, right? So that’s a fun thing to play when you get to be interesting but genuine. Usually it’s one or the other. I love that. 

With The Naked Gun, I really had to just be genuine and let the quirkiness happen around me. That wasn’t the most fun role, though. It was a very fun movie, but I had to kind of play the straight man to Liam Neeson. Fantastic Four was a little more operatic and a little more broad,

What I did in Americana is my favorite thing to do, which is play something unique and specific, yet, that feels like it could be plucked from your local grocery store or gas station.

Tost: I remember when I sent you the script and we talked before we went into prep. You were in a restaurant with your family, and you were like, “I think this is the voice,” and you did the voice. I was like, “Okay, yeah, I get the character now. I get what Paul’s going to bring to it.” 

Lefty is based on a guy I know. The transportation captain on a TV show I did, who was, like, disarmingly sincere to such a degree that it made me uncomfortable. That was almost the starting point. There’s no irony. There’s no meta element to him. There was just directly, “This is how I feel. Tony I love you,” you know? There are no quotation marks anywhere in anything he said or did. It’s compelling and sweet, but it also made me uncomfortable. 

Lefty and Sydney Sweeney’s character both dream of going to Nashville. What do you hope Nashville audiences get from this movie?

Hauser: I hope they feel seen as a place that is equal parts real as it gets, and also quirky. There’s that phrase of Austin, Texas, you know, “Keep Austin weird.” A movie like this is trying to keep it weird. I’m really tickled by it. I hope they are too.

Tost: I’d say it's a movie that really loves country music because I really love country music. When I was working on the cuts and a rep on my teams would say, “Tony, there’s too much country in here,”  I’d put more country music in there, just as a little bit of a fuck you. It’s part of its identity—that pedal steel guitar. It might be the only movie that’s coming out this year where pedal steel guitar is the primary instrument of the score. 

I was raised on country music. I like trying to put that soul and some country oddness and country earnestness in there as well.

Americana is now playing in theaters.