[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from the season three finale of Euphoria, “In God We Trust.”]
Sam Levinson had a unique ending for Rue, Zendaya‘s starring character in Euphoria, earlier than the loss of life of star Angus Cloud. Cloud, who performed drug vendor Fezco within the first two seasons of HBO‘s buzzy collection, died in 2023 at age 25 from a fentanyl-related overdose whereas Levinson was engaged on the third — and what would turn out to be ultimate — season that launched Sunday evening.
Within the season three finale, titled “In God We Trust,” Zendaya’s opiate addict Rue Bennett dies from fentanyl-laced Percocet given to her by drug kingpin Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), in a transfer of sadistic revenge for believing she was working with the DEA. Brown ultimately will get what he deserves, when Rue’s sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo) kills him in an epic shootout (one other scene that modified from its inception, the actor revealed to The Hollywood Reporter).
When talking on the New York Instances‘ Popcast after the finale, Levinson defined that he wrote a unique trajectory for Rue through the writers strike of 2023, however that when Cloud died that July, his loss of life sparked the ending viewers finally noticed — a finale that’s the end-end of Euphoria, now also confirmed by HBO.
“I’d always been really concerned about the prevalence of fentanyl. It’s something that we’ve dealt with over the seasons and even in my first film [Another Happy Day (2011)],” mentioned Levinson, who’s open about being in restoration from dependancy, on the popular culture present. “But once [Cloud] passed away, I had to reconceive the script and I thought, you can’t tell a story about addiction today without the very real consequences. Most people don’t get a second chance. Fentanyl can just take you out in an instant. It wasn’t like when I was growing up; you could literally take pills off the street and you might have a bad trip or something, but you’d be fine. This is something that hits close to home for a lot of people in this country. So it felt like the responsible thing to do.”
The creator and author confirmed that this finale is meant to be the top, though the episode hasn’t been explicitly known as a “series finale” by the creator or community. “In terms of the story that we set out to tell, which is a story about addiction and its consequences, this feels like the end to me,” Levinson mentioned. The Euphoria story is “a tragic one in the end — but it’s also the truth. If you are experimenting or taking drugs today, it’s very possible it’ll kill you.”
Levinson mentioned that, with all the ensemble, he got down to pull again “the illusions of the world that we live in, whether it’s ‘likes will fulfill your soul,’ whether it’s love, money, fame, drugs will provide an escape,” referring to story arcs for the other core characters performed by Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi, Alexa Demie, Hunter Schafer and Maude Apatow. “It felt like if we were really going to be saying something, we needed to put the audience in the position of a family member who loses someone that they love. And I know how much I love Rue and audiences love Rue. I wanted to mirror that feeling.”
Euphoria viewers have been hit with that feeling whereas watching Rue’s loss of life scene. At first, viewers have been made to imagine that Fezco — who Levinson saved alive within the present, and put in jail as a consequence of the season two finale — had escaped, and Rue was operating out of Ali’s home to go save her pal. However when Rue arrived again at her personal home, the sequence of occasions remodeled right into a hallucination and was slowly revealed to be her crossing over.
Throughout a finale screening on the Brooklyn Paramount Theater in NYC on Sunday evening that THR attended, you would hear a pin drop because the shocked viewers watched Rue’s ultimate second. The sequence additionally introduced again a glimpse at Storm Reid, who performed Rue’s sister, and returned Nika King, who performs Rue’s mom, and included unseen footage of Rue and Fezco together in a tribute to Cloud.
Zendaya within the finale of Euphoria.
HBO
Rue’s loss of life hit even more durable after a season along with her dependancy not being entrance and heart. The life-and-death stakes have been raised when the previous highschool collection jumped 5 years to indicate a now-young grownup Rue turning into a drug mule and dealing for rival kingpins (Martha Kelly’s Laurie additionally took her personal life within the finale). There was a four-year real-time hole between seasons two and three that prompted the leap, in addition to rumors of conflict behind the scenes.
“You can go through different phases of addiction where you’re using every single second of a day to feeling like you kind of have your life together. Maybe you smoke a little weed, you drink, but it’s not the most pressing issue,” Levinson explained of Rue’s dependancy and loss of life arc in season three. “But that addictive personality is always underneath the surface. And in the end, she’s banged up and her hand got cut. I always thought of it as a window into whatever pain is going on in her psyche. And she feels, ‘OK, I’ll just take one.’ And I always imagine it was the fentanyl that she had smuggled into the country in the first episode [of season three, which foreshadowed her death].”
When talking about that premiere, Levinson had informed THR, “I was really angry about fentanyl, the fact that in 2023, the year Angus died, 73,000 Americans died of fentanyl overdoses. I couldn’t understand what it was about our country that we were allowing so many people to be poisoned.”
Levinson additionally devoted his finale introduction speech to Cloud when chatting with the attendees on the Brooklyn Paramount Theater on Sunday, speaking about telling a narrative about dependancy and its penalties and the way, when life occurs between the work, it shapes the story.
“This season we lost Angus. Many of you loved him the way I did. He had such a light that could just fill up a entire room and he deserved more time — a longer, fuller life. But he was taken, like far too many people in this country, by fentanyl,” he mentioned earlier than the screening. “Grief has a way of clarifying what matters. It strips everything down to essentials. Your family, your friends, your faith … But even in the face of unimaginable loss, the decision to keep hoping, to believe in a better world, might be the very thing that can create one.”
When chatting with Popcast, Levinson additionally defended the sexualization of the collection, defined why a number of the storylines ended up mirroring actual life, and why some characters have been minimized.
“From the script, you get a sense of what the role requires. Even when you go up to audition, let’s use the role of Cassie [played by Sweeney], you know the role requires a certain amount of nudity. Are you comfortable? If they’re comfortable, they get the role, then the next layer is the intimacy coordinator. I think it’s a SAG [Screen Actors Guild] rule that if an actor then says, after getting cast, actually, I don’t want to do that, we can’t force them to do a scene. I believe very strongly that the best, most honest performances are when an actor feels free and safe. … So my job is to create the kind of best, most conducive environment for the actor to play this character,” he defined when speaking about Sweeney’s OnlyFans storyline.
When requested particularly concerning the inventive visions for Nate (Elordi’s character, who died a horrific death in the penultimate episode) and Jules (Schafer’s character, who had much less and fewer display screen time), Levinson mentioned that logistically the 178-day shoot was difficult, along with protecting the shoot on funds, however that “in terms of the story, I tend to look at it more like a film instead of a television show. Sometimes a character takes a front seat, sometimes they take a back seat, sometimes they’re in an episode, sometimes they’re not.”
With Nate, particularly, he mentioned “all of the wheeling and dealing that he does is the engine for Cassie’s story, which becomes the bigger arc of the season, as opposed to each episode we’re going to delve into his specific struggles. I think because audiences know the history of these characters, everything is always a little, like — it gets compared to what you know.”
Finally, Levinson mentioned he didn’t view the ending to be pessimistic.
“At what point do you just say something is evil? If you’re selling poison to kids and you’re killing them, it’s evil. And what do you do in that situation? How do you confront it? How do you deal with it?” he mentioned of the anger explored by Domingo’s Ali after Rue’s loss of life.
However then he continued: “We live in a pretty fucked up world. It’s what Lexi [Maude’s character] says in that conversation with Cassie where she read the Bible. She doesn’t really understand it, but she does know people are always dying and you’ve just got to go on. There’s definitely a fragility there. But it’s a renewal of sorts. If we can kind of get our shit together and take care of our loved ones and maybe believe in something a little greater than ourselves, then we can carve out a future.”
Euphoria season three is streaming on HBO Max. Learn extra of THR‘s finale protection here, together with our cowl tales with Alexa Demie and Colman Domingo.
