Since “Euphoria” aired its second season in 2022, loss has enveloped the cast and crew of the HBO series, with the deaths of Angus Cloud and executive producer Kevin Turen in 2023 as well as Eric Dane just earlier this year. It was the death of Cloud, who died from an accidental overdose involving fentanyl, that creator Sam Levinson worked through as he prepared to take “Euphoria” into its next chapter.
“It was, obviously, incredibly difficult losing Angus,” Levinson told TheWrap. “He’s someone that I love very deeply, and put a lot of my heart and soul into trying to get him healthy, and keep him healthy, and so when he passed away … it raised a lot of questions, just about fentanyl, about how fentanyl is coming into this country.”
While the issue of fentanyl — which Levinson noted led to the death of 73,000 people in the U.S. the year that Cloud passed while only 153 people total died in Europe — was something he aimed to tackle in the background, Cloud’s passing also prompted Levinson to question what he wanted to say about being a young adult in this world as he took the main cast from high school into adulthood. Ultimately, he landed on telling a story about “faith and belief in something greater than oneself,” drawing from the third step of AA as Zendaya’s Rue takes the next step in her addiction recovery.
“I thought it was an important and kind of hopeful through-line that can counterbalance, I think, some of the darkness that we often deal with in this show,” Levinson said. “And most importantly, I just wanted to honor Angus. I’m really proud of how it all turned out … I think we did right by him.”
With Season 3 embracing a several-year time jump from where we last saw Zendaya’s Rue, Hunter Schafer’s Jules, Alexa Demie’s Maddy, Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie, Jacob Elordi’s Nate and Maude Apatow’s Lexi at East Highland High, Levinson aimed to find what was authentic to the characters fans have come to know and love since the show’s 2019 debut.
“I sat down, and I just started to imagine what this world would look like, and what some of the new characters would look like,” Levinson said. “I remember I had a conversation very early on with Sydney, and she was great. She just said, ‘Look, I don’t care what happens, just make sure she’s crazy.’ I said, ‘Fantastic. Make sure Cassie is crazy.’”
Levinson certainly delivered on that front, bringing an engaged Cassie and Nate to a Republican enclave as Cassie tests her luck as an influencer with a curiosity for OnlyFans. Maddy and Lexi have been working their way up the Hollywood ladder, while Jules has delved into the world of escorting and, as for Rue, she’s still tied up in the drug world.
All of the crew navigates adulthood through the lens of Southern California, with Maddy and Lexi in Los Angeles proper, while Nate and Cassie appear to have settled in the Orange County area, a departure from the small town depicted in the first two installments. “I don’t want to be in the same town, I don’t want to be in the same high school,” Levinson said. “I’ve always felt that this show had a bigger scope than that. I was finally free to write as big as I had always kind of imagined it to be.”
For Levinson, setting Season 3 in California plays on the dream of what could be for the main cast, with Levinson noting “I always think of it from a bit of an outsider perspective, because I didn’t really grow up here, and but watching old movies, you go like, ‘Oh, that’s what California looks like’ … I wanted it to be real, but also part of our collective memory of it.” It also gave Levinson a chance to spotlight the diversity within California’s landscapes and communities, from Long Beach to downtown L.A. “It just started creating this tapestry that I thought was exciting and felt fresh to me,” he said.
Alongside the California landscape, Levinson took inspiration from Westerns, which he puts simply: “It’s the wild west of being an adult.”
“I go back to Howard Hawks, Don Siegel, Anthony Mann, [Sam] Peckinpah and [Sergio] Leone — these are movies that just that are larger than life and and transport us to another world,” he said. “It just felt like the the right atmosphere for this.”
Similarly, Levinson aimed to keep evolving the visual imagery of the series, but didn’t want to repeat the maturation from Season 1 to Season 2, which saw the series move from digital to film and switch up the color palette to become a bit darker and murkier.
“With this season, we wanted to open up the aspect ratio — we wanted to tell the story, but in a less subjective way. We didn’t want to be inside of the characters as much. We wanted to see them existing in in the world and in life,” Levinson said. “I wanted it to be a sunny season — I wanted to have sunshine. I wanted to find the shadows within it, as opposed to all the night stuff that we had done.”
Levinson finds his own sunshine in Season 3 by keeping Fezco, the beloved character played by Cloud, alive despite not appearing or filming any of the season.
“I tried really hard to keep him clean while he was here. I loved him very much,” Levinson said. “I just kind of thought, ‘Well, if I couldn’t keep them alive in real life, then maybe I could at least keep them alive in ‘Euphoria’ … I wanted to honor him this season … he’s a big part of the thread of this season, and I hope he’d be proud.”
It’s the hope that light in the darkness that Levinson hopes strikes his audiences, saying he hopes the season “inspires people to look outside of themselves a little bit more and to look at how beautiful the world is, and, and every little deed and every little kind of interaction we have with one another.” “I think it’s a celebration of life in many ways,” he said.
Anticipation for the season has brewed speculation that it could be the final chapter, with much of the main cast booked in major movie franchises and Zendaya recently revealing the installment brings closure to Rue’s story. For Levinson, however, his approach to the new installment was no different than others: “I’ve always written every season like it’s the last season … Season 1 she does the drugs. We go to this musical number. I’m happy … and if this is it, this is it.”
“I really try to maintain that kind of mentality when working where I don’t get ahead of myself — I don’t look too much in the future,” Levinson said. “I don’t go, ‘Well, what if this happens and that happens?’ I keep the blinders on, keep my head down, and I just want to deliver the best season possible for audiences.”
“Euphoria” Season 3 premieres Sundays on HBO.
