Olivia Wilde‘s latest directorial feature, Don’t Worry Darling, has an all-star cast including Harry Styles, Florence Pugh, Gemma Chan, and Chris Pine. But there’s one lesser-known cast member who is actually related to Kyle Chandler, 57. The Friday Night Lights star’s daughter Sydney Chandler, 25, plays the role of Violet in the psychological thriller, which marks her first major feature film. Here’s everything you need to know about Sydney.
Sydney is Kyle Chandler’s oldest child.
Sydney is the eldest child of Kyle and his wife of over 25 years, Kathryn Macquarrie. Sydney has a younger sister named Sawyer. The Chandler family lives outside of Austin, Texas, though they frequent Los Angeles due to Kyle and Sydney’s Hollywood career connections.
She plays Violet in ‘Don’t Worry Darling’.
Sydney’s Don’t Worry Darling character is a housewife and friend of Alice Chambers (played by Florence Pugh). They live in Victory, California, where their husbands work on the secret “Victory Project” which sparks Alice’s suspicions. Sydney explained how she related to Violet as a newcomer to Hollywood in an interview with WWD.
“Me, myself as Sydney was very new to this world, and so I felt my character very, very quickly, just kind of stepping in and soaking up the vibe on set and seeing how all of it works,” she said. “And so that kind of translated really perfectly for my character.”
She was in a show about the Sex Pistols.
Sydney had a lead role in the FX on Hulu miniseries Pistols, about Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and the band’s rise to fame. She played Chrissie Hynde, founding member of the Pretenders who almost married Steve and his bandmate Johnny Rotten for a work permit.
She didn’t want to be an actor at first.
“My dad’s an actor, and so you never want to do what your parents are doing,” Sydney explained in her WWD interview. “So I stayed very far away from that. And then I wanted to be a vet, and then I think it was my last year of high school when I was failing my math and my science, I was like, ‘maybe not.’ And then I went into creative writing, and I ended up taking an acting class in Austin here in town when I was studying for my writing. And I wanted to just do a character study on writers, on actors, and see people trying to act, that would be an interesting person to evaluate. And then I ended up just absolutely falling in love with it. My acting coach said, ‘you can stay in the class if you start auditioning,’ and it all just kind of went from there.”
Her dad’s given her advice.
Kyle, who is also famous from the movies Manchester by the Sea, The Wolf of Wall Street, and First Man, has been there for his daughter as she follows in his footsteps professionally.
“He’s been extremely supportive and we actually, we’ve had some really good talks about, you know. I want to make my own way through this, my own path through this, with my work,” Sydney told WWD. “And he’s been really, really just supportive. He’s my dad. He’s there for me,” she said.