With the film’s underperformance in its opening box office becoming a side effect of the backlash towards Sydney Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle advertisement, Americana actress Halsey has gone to Instagram to defend the film and its writer/director, Tony Tost. The multi-Grammy-nominated actress and singer recently expressed her support for the film’s “hardworking director and his hardworking crew.”

“I do agree that our words are important in this climate”, Halsey wrote in an Instagram story. “I don’t, however, think that it’s fair for the news cycle to predatorily rip a hardworking director and his hardworking crew for their film that is completely separate-from and unrelated-to a (pretty dumb) advertising take.” “If it’s not clear who the actual people I’m standing up for are, I’m sorry, look closer,” Halsey added.

Halsey also expressed her disappointment in how the film ended up in the middle of this controversy in a now-deleted X post. “I’m not upset the film’s release is being hurt by the timing. I am upset that a bunch of non-celebrity people involved in this film are being bullied by the media”, she wrote in the post. “I have said everything I am permitted to say about my feelings on the ad. And if you’re a fan of mine and think I ‘support eugenics’ then idk what to say idk why you’re a fan then tbh…”

Americana, which stars both Sweeney and Halsey and Paul Walter Hauser, follows a group of people in a small South Dakota town whose lives begin to violently intertwine as they search for a Native American artifact that ended up on the black market. The film is still playing in limited theaters.