To understand Sydney Sweeney’s love for Tank, you first need to understand Sydney Sweeney’s great-grandmother. Her great-grandmother loved dogs so much that she owned eight. And when she ran out of room and no more could stay with her, she went to stay with them, volunteering once a week at a local animal shelter.
One weekend, she brought a 17-year-old Sydney with her. The teenager saw a female pitbull-mix puppy—no more than four weeks old—in a cage. Her stomach was an angry red mess of infected stitches. “She had been fixed at a really young age—like, two and a half, three weeks old. You’re not supposed to do it that young,” Sydney says. The staff told her they weren’t sure if she’d live.
Sydney was heartbroken, and also under lax supervision: Her great-grandmother told her to go for it. So she adopted the dog, drove home to Los Angeles, and surprised her parents. They immediately grounded her.
As she bottle-fed her new best friend, Sydney had a vision of what the dog could become: “I wanted her to grow up and be a big tank—be my protector,” she says. So that’s exactly what she named her.
From that moment on, Tank went with Sydney everywhere. “Because she was so young, I brought her to school—it was during the time where my mom was, like, ‘You’re going to have to learn to take responsibility for your actions,’” she says. (Tank ended up thriving in that environment: “She became kind of like the class pet and would walk around in different classrooms.”)
And as her owner transitioned from student to star—Sweeney was just 21 when she had her breakout role in HBO’s Sharp Objects—Tank came with her too. She’d hang out in Sydney’s trailer or run around the Euphoria back lot with Jacob Elordi’s golden retriever, Layla. Sometimes she’d even watch her human film a scene. (Tank thrived here too: “She will literally lay under the camera and not move,” she says. “The moment we call action, she stops moving and doesn’t make a sound. Then you call cut and then she gets up. It’s amazing.”)
Was Tank able to understand her owner had become famous? At first, Sweeney says she doesn’t think so. But then she pauses. “Maybe she knows it because she got a backyard?” she says. Since they lived in an apartment, she explains, Tank didn’t have one for awhile. It became a goal of Sweeney’s, as she tirelessly worked towards moving from bit parts to leading roles: “My whole dream, since I got her in high school, was to be able to get her a backyard,” she says.