[This article contains spoilers from the Euphoria season three premiere.]
Originally, Rue was going to cross the border by river. After the gap of four years since the end of the second season, writer and director Sam Levinson knew Euphoria would return its often-confused protagonist (played by Zendaya) to Mexico, having made the leap from teenager to adult, still working to pay off debts incurred during reckless high school. The story had her coming and going in dangerous drug deals for unlikely kingpin Laurie (Martha Kelly). But when Levinson began researching how he would introduce this new world, he changed course.
“We went to the DEA headquarters in Los Angeles and they had a ton of pictures of drug raids they had done—kilograms of cocaine, money, all this—and all of a sudden I see this picture of a Jeep stuck on top of a border wall,” Levinson says. “I said to the director, ‘Well, what happened here?’ And he said, ‘Some idiot tried to cross the border with a car loaded with drugs and got stuck.’ I thought, “That sounds like something Rue would do.”
So Euphoria The third season begins, with Rue at the wheel, trapped in the air between two countries. The set introduces the HBO drama’s new ambitions in several ways. In its widest aspect ratio and expansive vista captured in 65mm, Levinson and his longtime cinematographer, Marcell Rév, rebooted EuphoriaAnd in the scene’s mix of comedy and tension, the show establishes its complicated tonal balance going forward.
“That scene is like Jurassic Park meet Buster Keaton,” says Rév. Levinson adds that Keaton inspired the season as much as classic Western filmmakers like Howard Hawks and Sergio Leone.
Marcell Rév and Sam Levinson behind the scenes of Euphoria.
Eddy Chen/HBO
“We have a motto: evolve or die,” Levinson says of how he and his team approach each season of Euphoria. With the huge jump in time this round, Levinson and Rév knew the cinematography would have to reflect that kind of dangerous maturity. “We wanted to make sure we were changing things up. We wanted to give it the feeling of a memory that was fading, a little grittier,” Levinson says. “We’re seeing them in the world, in the world at large, and allowing the actors to communicate emotionally through acting, unlike in the past when we did it more through the camera. We wanted to see them stand on their own.”
Zendaya in HBO season 3 Euphoria.
HBO
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Before the 2023 Hollywood strikes, Levinson had most of a third season of Euphoria scripted, which was ultimately largely scrapped. There were several reasons for the change, but he says the most profound was the death of cast member Angus Cloud, who played Fezco, from an accidental overdose. Levinson was close to Cloud and wanted to honor his memory as best he could on the show, as he was set to play a major role in the third season. This meant keeping his character alive, albeit off-screen, of course, and facing larger questions of life and death.
The end of the first episode, for example, finds Rue making a stop at a party thrown by rival kingpin Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), only for things to go horribly wrong when it’s clear the drugs have been mixed. “She sent you to sabotage my shit?” Alamo asks Rue de Laurie. She shakes her head nervously, the stakes of the episode rising exponentially, but the moment isn’t there just for the mood swing. “I was really angry about fentanyl, the fact that in 2023, the year Angus died, 73,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdoses,” Levinson says. “I couldn’t understand why our country allowed so many people to be poisoned.”
Another key development: Levinson and Rév did a completely different show between seasons of Euphoria in the idolwhich was ultimately canceled by HBO after poor ratings and reviews for the troubled first season. The couple says their time on that musical series was informed Euphoria third season.
“The way I saw [The Idol] At times it was almost like I was filming a reality TV show, so there would be three cameras and minimal lighting. It was almost documentary-style,” Levinson says. “Every time you do something, whatever you do next, you want to do the opposite… and there’s a certain objectivity in that this season [of Euphoria] “What we have discovered is really exciting and creative and gives it a new kind of life.”
Levinson and Rev.
Rév reveals that the idol indicated how to expand EuphoriaThe real world too. “Thinking about the idolOn a very practical level, it encouraged us to go out and photograph more realistic locations,” he says. “The second season of Euphoria it was very much on stage – 80% of the time, if we didn’t have to go to the location, we’d build it on stage. Here we were pretty eager to find certain things in the real world.” Take the opening sequence: “We were able to build this 200-foot border wall in the middle of the desert, four hours from Los Angeles, to achieve this sequence,” Levinson says. “She’s really up there: she’s 20 or 25 feet in the air.”
This also informed updates in the lives of Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and Nate (Jacob Elordi), who we meet in the season premiere engaged and anxiously preparing for an expensive wedding. Exploring their striking, sunny California home proved crucial.
“An obvious choice would have been something modern, very simple and elegant, but we ended up choosing this mid-century house, which is a little tacky, but also stuck in the ’70s,” Rév says. “It’s probably a strange choice, but it also gives us possibilities.” This especially applies when Cassie goes on to create Onlyfans content to increase her income. “OnlyFans has its own aesthetic and how to elevate that aesthetic to the aesthetic of the show is a challenge, I’m not going to lie,” Rév says.
“[Cassie] “He has his dog house and his little dog ears and nose, and that has its own humor, but what makes the scene is the fact that his housekeeper is the one who films it,” Levinson adds of how they approached their Onlyfans scenes in the premiere. “What we always wanted to find is the other layer of absurdity that we can put together so as not to be too far into their fantasy or illusion: the joke is to jump, break the wall.”
This meant juxtaposing the iPhone images with how Euphoria creates her images: “Some of these scenes we just lit with these rings of light that she used… When you’re inside, there’s this beautiful, bright front light, but then you jump out and it’s just a puddle of light and everything around it is dark. It’s just twisted and jarring,” Levinson says. “We wanted to capture what she’s trying to show the audience and be inside of it, but then also step back further and see how depressing it is.”
“Shooting it on a 65mm camera with our lenses on our film gives it a certain look, and I think it’s an interesting combination,” adds Rév. “Making an OnlyFans aesthetic with these tools is something that excites me.”
The first episode ends with Rue in a life-or-death dice roll with Alamo, as he tests his destiny after Laurie’s apparent betrayal. Rue narrowly survives and lets out a scream of ecstasy to celebrate her survival, regardless of the uncertainty of what will come next. As the season progresses from here, that moment, sitting on that boundary between the living and the dead, speaks to what Levinson hopes to explore this season. The episode is dedicated to Cloud, as well as fellow co-star Eric Dane and former executive producer Kevin Turen, who also died between the release of seasons two and three.
“I wanted to tell a story about the step of turning our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand Him,” Levinson says. “These characters who are now adults are free to choose what kind of life they want to live, but there are consequences that come with those actions. I look at that long period of time [between seasons]with all its tragedies and everything, as a blessing.”
Euphoria airs Sundays at 9 pm on HBO and HBO Max. See where all the characters landed in the season three time jump.