Being cast alongside Halsey in “The Players Table” wasn’t a random occurrence, but the result of Sydney Sweeney being one of the project’s producers. As Deadline reported, in 2020, Sweeney launched her own production company, Fifty-Fifty Films, with “The Players Table” as the company’s inaugural project. “Well, Ash is amazing,” Sweeney told ET, calling Halsey by her given name, Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, adding that she was “so excited for people to be able to see her onscreen.”
As Sweeney told Deadline, forming a production company in order to create her own passion projects had been an ongoing ambition. “Starting Fifty-Fifty Films has been a goal of mine for a long time,” Sweeney said. “When I read ‘They Wish They Were Us’ [the novel upon which “The Players Club” is based] I was instantly drawn to the specificity of the world and the struggles of the character — and I knew it was the first project I wanted to produce.”
After working with Halsey in the “Graveyard” music video, Sweeney told StyleCaster she knew the singer “had it in her” to nail the role. “I sent her the book. I was like, ‘Read this. Let me know if you like it because I think you would be absolutely incredible as the older sister, Rachel.’ She read it within two days, called me and was like, ‘I want to do this.’ So we brought her on and that was how everything fell together,” Sweeney explained.
