Kim Novak has voiced her disapproval of the casting of Sydney Sweeney as herself in an upcoming biopic, saying she is “totally wrong to play me”.
Speaking to the Times, the 93-year-old actor said she would have “never approved” the biopic Scandalous, about her relationship with the musician Sammy Davis Jr.
The film’s development has reportedly stalled, but Sweeney’s Euphoria co-star Colman Domingo is connected to direct the film, with Sweeney cast as Novak and British actor David Jonsson as Davis.
Sweeney “sticks out so much above the waist”, Novak told the Times, adding that she was worried that the film would focus too heavily on her sexual dynamic with Davis.
“There’s no way it wouldn’t be a sexual relationship because Sydney Sweeney looks sexy all the time,” Novak said. “She was totally wrong to play me.”
Sweeney has yet to respond to the remarks. In October, she told People she was “incredibly honoured” to play Novak and “so excited” to meet her.
“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,” Sweeney said at the time. “And I think that for me, I relate to it in a lot of different ways.”
In August, Novak told the Guardian she took issue with the film’s title. “I don’t think the relationship was scandalous,” she said. “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.”
Novak and Davis first met in 1956 and their romance quietly developed over the following year. Davis regularly visited Novak on the set of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and the two spent Thanksgiving and Christmas together. But in 1958, their relationship was outed by a gossip columnist, sparking worries at Columbia Pictures that a public backlash against their star Novak for being in an interracial relationship would hurt the studio.
Novak publicly denied she and Davis were in a relationship, but the Columbia boss, Harry Cohn, hired crime figures to threaten to blind Davis or break his legs unless he married a black woman within 48 hours; just nine days later, Davis married a black woman, the dancer Loray White. The pair never lived together and commenced divorce proceedings nine months later.
Novak briefly married the British actor Richard Johnson in 1965, then equine veterinarian Robert Malloy in 1976; the couple remained together until his death in 2020.