Puck: Scooter Braun has inserted himself into Sydney Sweeney’s business & career

Sydney Sweeney’s bad picker is reaching legendary status. Sweeney broke off her engagement to the much-older Jonathan Davino in early 2025. It took months for Sweeney to untangle herself from everything Davino had involved himself in. Then, newly single, Sweeney attended Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s Venice wedding last year. During the festivities, several celebrity men were trying to hit on her. She ended up choosing Scooter Braun, the former manager and current… investor or something. Braun used to manage Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber. These days, Scooter is divorced, he has a lot of money, and he’s trying to Svengali his way into Sydney’s life. He joined her in Venice last week, and Puck News had an update about just how involved Scooter has become in Sydney’s life, business, representation and money. From Puck’s “The Scooter-ification of Sydney Sweeney.”

Congrats to CAA for winning the Sydney Sweeney sweepstakes, signing the actress/lingerie entrepreneur this week, months after her agent, Jennifer Millar, left Paradigm to become a manager at Brillstein. You will not believe this, but Scooter Braun, the self-promoting music mogul turned self-promoting Sweeney boyfriend, inserted himself into the process. Per five separate sources, Scooter went around Millar to set Sweeney up for dinner with CAA’s Kevin Huvane, a meeting that led to her signing with him over rivals that had been clamoring for a similar sit-down. (Braun declined to comment, though another source insisted Millar and her producing partner were familiar with the CAA courtship via previous meetings and didn’t need to be looped in. Millar did not return my call.)

Braun, who famously managed Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, among others, before burning one too many bridges, buying and selling Taylor Swift’s catalog, and reinventing himself as an executive at Hybe America and now an investor, seems to be getting more involved in Sweeney’s career, especially her brand partnerships, according to several sources in their orbit. I heard earlier this year that he was pushing the Housemaid star toward endorsement deals with companies he’s involved in, like the telehealth platform Ro, which offers an impressive selection of erectile dysfunction pills. (At the time, a source close to Braun denied he was involved at all in her professional decisions, and the Ro deal never happened.)

Meanwhile, Sweeney just parted with Nicole Perna, Melissa Raubvogel, and Maria Candida of ImPRint, her publicity team of nearly a decade. ImPRint declined to comment, but it was apparently a mutual separation, with Sweeney increasingly taking her P.R. direction from Braun, and the ImPRint team frustrated that she was not listening to them. (She’s currently plugging a new collection from Syrn, her lingerie line, called “Birthday Boobs.”) I can only imagine the publicists’ faces when they booked Sweeney a Variety women’s event last fall as part of their strategy to get her taken more seriously as an awards-worthy actor, and she showed up in a see-through top that generated thousands of headlines… not about her acting.

Whatever. At 28, Sweeney’s clearly doing something right—between Housemaid ($400 million worldwide) and Anyone But You ($220 million), she’s starred in two of the very few low-budget breakout hits of the past three years. And she’s still considered a get for brands, as evidenced by the Armani Beauty dinner she and Braun went to Venice to attend tonight. Now, with Huvane in her life and Scooter being Scooter, it’ll be interesting to see how one of the few legitimate movie stars of her generation charts her next moves.

[From Puck]

Here’s the thing: I can see how Sydney Sweeney, a 28-year-old who worked her way up through the industry without any nepotism connections, would be attracted to an older, well-connected, wealthier man telling her that he can help her. Like, Scooter personally seeing to the Kevin Huvane meeting is not necessarily a bad thing – I could make an argument that Braun was legitimately helping her and that his experience and advice in that area was above-board. Unfortunately, I absolutely believe that Braun is giving her bad advice and trying to push her into bad deals. That’s where Kevin Huvane will hopefully step in and talk some sense to his new client. I like the side-story here, which is that Sydney needs to be saved from her own tacky and terrible instincts too.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid.