Note: This story contains spoilers from “Euphoria” Season 3, Episode 3.
Ever since photos of Sydney Sweeney wearing a wedding dress as Cassie leaked during production for “Euphoria” Season 3, anticipation for her and Nate’s wedding has been building among fans. Then Cassie’s premiere ultimatum for $50k worth of flowers — which the production team more than delivered on — set the scene for some classic “Euphoria” chaos to come.
Episode 3’s wedding event marks one of the first chances this season to see the main cast all together due to their largely disparate storylines. “It was beautiful. I mean, the wedding was a blast to shoot,” creator Sam Levinson told TheWrap. “It’s also fairly complicated because we had so many cast members on set, but we were able to shoot it in order for the most part.”
Levinson applauded Jacob Elordi and Sweeney for leaning into both the humor and the anxiety that “creeps in throughout” the event, which the showrunner calls “equal parts hilarious and also tragic.”
The wedding also sees Eric Dane return as Cal Jacobs, who shows up with questionable support for his son while reuniting with Hunter Schafer’s Jules. Dane filmed the scenes following his ALS diagnosis, but died in February, prior to the Season 3 premiere.
“Eric was struggling at the time, but he showed up with such grace and dignity, and he was just such a professional, and we had so much fun working on those scenes and he’s just brilliant in this season,” Levinson recalled. “I loved him. I miss him … I’ve got nothing but beautiful memories of that man.”
Production designer François Audouy aimed to make the wedding itself a lavish spectacle as a metaphor for “American delusion” and the importance of outward appearances.
“It’s the idea that if the exterior is beautiful enough, the interior rot doesn’t matter,” Audouy told TheWrap, noting that Cassie’s ask of $50k for the flowers as Nate treads water financially implies a “hollowness” in their relationship. “I wanted to make a venue that was generally beautiful … and seductive [but] it couldn’t look wrong or cheap, because then this metaphor would collapse. I wanted to create a space that felt like a tragedy that was living inside perfection.”
Like most weddings, one of the first steps was locking in a color scheme. Audouy had already evolved Nate and Cassie’s color palette from past installments, leaning into blushes, pinks and creams for Season 3, and he turned up the volume for the wedding, noting he and Levinson even took inspiration from the tackiness of the pinks in a shrimp cocktail.
“I literally became so obsessive that I color sampled shrimp,” Audouy said. “But it echoes sort of the ludicrous concept behind this over the top wedding to obsess about color in that way.”
Audouy lined the walls with a yellow orange-y caramel color, which he noted served as a “dreamy primary color” to pair well with the pinks, including the thousands of flowers that filled the wedding venue, emulating Cassie’s biggest dreams. The production team brought in a company called Magpie Florals to assist with the flower arrangements, which Audouy said cleaned out all the local farms in Southern California and flew in the rest from Miami, Ecuador and Amsterdam. “They literally wiped out the entire farms inventory across multiple countries,” he recalled. “The entire L.A. floral market was without this color palette in stock.”
In total, the ceremony used 10,710 stems, including 2,875 roses, and the reception used 14,382 stems, including 4,600 roses. “It became … a bit of a manifesto for me,” Audouy said. “It was not just adding some floral details — it was about making a statement.”
With filming taking place across nine days, Audouy said the flowers total was “considerably more” than the $50k Cassie demanded.
“We spent considerably more than that,” Audouy said. “The number is kind of shocking and almost embarrassing to tell you, but … it was a decision that we all made together because of .. metaphorical importance of telling the story with … the amount of florals, and to Sam’s genius, he folded that into the story where it became part of Cassie’s motivation.”
Production also enlisted a separate team to change out both the florals as well as the ice sculptures. Time restraints also required the team to commission 10 sculptures of Nate and Cassie, 10 sculptures for the shrimp buffet and 10 ice luges, with Audouy noting, “We wanted to straddle the border between beauty, excess and gluttony.”
The inspiration behind the monogrammed floral arrangements and the multiple ice sculptures were pulled from Instagram and Pinterest, platforms Audouy and the team assumed Cassie would be scrolling through as she made her dream wedding mood board.
“We live in a culture right now where everyone’s lives are online, but everyone’s having more fun, everyone’s successful, everyone’s having the most amazing wedding and … everyone wants to be rich and famous,” Audouy said. “We wanted to create this sort of saccharine, Pinterest, Instagram, clickbait wedding that was the kind of imagery that Cassie was obsessing about on her phone.”
While the wedding might’ve achieved Cassie’s Pinterest goals on paper, Audouy hoped to craft “Cassie’s fever dream of what she always dreamed of,” imbuing the wedding with a sense of underlying dread and uneasiness as the audience anticipates the disaster hiding just underneath the surface as a surprise guest appears at the wedding to collect Nate’s debts and Cassie, as usual, begins to lose it.
“Everything with the wedding had to be genuinely beautiful but also quietly devastating,” Audouy said. “[I] was trying to visually create a beautiful tension … where you felt anything was going to collapse at any moment.”
And collapse it did. Nate’s debt collectors waited to fully strike until the couple was home from the wedding, making for a perverse moment as they crossed the threshold into their new life to be met with violence rather than a romantic evening.
The house, which Audouy describes as a “time machine” with the original carpet and wallpaper from the ’60s that the team snatched up four days after it went on the market, almost marks a fitting spot for the couple’s bubble to burst.
“The house and the wedding are sort of parallel ideas that together create a picture of a couple who are already overextending themselves because of their dreams and not really thinking things through,” Audouy said. “They’re not living in the real world, right? They’re living in a fantasy land, and then we see the repercussions of that fantasy where it comes all crashing down … at the end of Episode 3.”
“Euphoria” Season 3 drops new episodes Sundays on HBO.