[This article contains spoilers from the Euphoria season three premiere.]
Originally, Rue was going to cross the border by river. Following the four-year gap from his season two finale, writer-director Sam Levinson knew Euphoria would return with his oft-addled protagonist (portrayed by Zendaya) in Mexico, having made the jump from teenager to adult, still working off the debts incurred during the recklessness of high school. The story had her going back and forth on dangerous drug runs for the unlikely kingpin Laurie (Martha Kelly). But when Levinson started doing research for how he’d introduce this new world, he changed course.
“We went to the DEA headquarters in Los Angeles and they’ve got a bunch of photos of drug busts that they’ve done — kilos of cocaine, money, all this — and suddenly I see this one photo of a Jeep stuck on top of a border wall,” Levinson says. “I said to the head, ‘Well, what happened here?’ And he said, ‘Some idiot tried to drive a car over the border loaded with drugs, and it got stuck.’ I thought: That sounds like something Rue would do.”
So Euphoria season three begins, with Rue behind the wheel, stuck in midair between two countries. The setpiece introduces the HBO drama’s new ambitions in several ways. In its wider aspect ratio and expansive vista caught on 65mm, Levinson and his longtime D.P. Marcell Rév reset Euphoria’s visual palette. And in the combined comedy and tension of the scene, the show establishes its tricky tonal balance going forward.
“That scene is like Jurassic Park meets Buster Keaton,” Rév says. 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 of: Evolve or die,” Levinson says of how he and his crew approach each season of Euphoria. With the massive time-jump this go-round, Levinson and Rév knew that the cinematography would need to reflect that kind of dangerous maturity. “We wanted to make sure we were changing things up. We wanted to give it a feeling of a memory that was fading away — a bit rougher,” Levinson says. “We’re seeing them out in the world, in the wider world, and allowing the actors to communicate emotionally through the performance, as opposed to in the past, when we did it moreso through camera. We wanted to see them fending for themselves.”
Zendaya in Season 3 of HBO’s Euphoria.
HBO
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Before the Hollywood strikes of 2023, Levinson had the bulk 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 one was the death of castmember Angus Cloud, who played Fezco, from an accidental overdose. Levinson was close to Cloud and wanted to honor his memory as best he could in the show, since he was meant to play a large role in season three. This meant keeping his character alive, if of course offscreen, and confronting larger questions of life and death.
The end of the first episode, for instance, finds Rue making a dropoff at a party hosted by rival kingpin Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), only for things to go terrifyingly awry when it’s clear the drugs have been laced. “She send you to sabotage my shit?” Alamo asks Rue of Laurie. She shakes her head nervously, the stakes of the episode raising exponentially, but the moment isn’t placed there just for the mood shift. “I was really angry about fentanyl, the fact that in 2023, the year Angus died, 73,000 Americans died of fentanyl overdoses,” Levinson says. “I couldn’t understand what it was about our country that we were allowing so many people to be poisoned.”
Another key development: Levinson and Rév made an entirely different show between seasons of Euphoria in The Idol, which was ultimately canceled by HBO following poor ratings and reviews for the embattled first season. The pair say their time on that music-driven series informed Euphoria season three.
“The way that I saw [The Idol] was almost like I was filming a reality TV show at times — so it would be three cameras, minimal lighting. It was almost documentary style,” Levinson says. “Anytime you do something, whatever you’re doing next, you kind of want to do the opposite…and there’s a certain objectivity that this season [of Euphoria] has that we discovered, that is really exciting and creative and gives it a new kind of life.”
Levinson and Rév.
Rév reveals that The Idol indicated how to expand Euphoria’s actual world too. “Thinking of The Idol, on a very practical level, it encouraged us to go out and shoot more real locations,” he says. “The second season of Euphoria was very much on a stage — 80% of if we didn’t have to go on location, we would build it on stage. Here we were pretty eager to find certain things in the real world.” Take that opening sequence: “We were able to build this 200-foot border wall out in the middle of the desert, four hours outside of Los Angeles, to achieve this sequence,” Levinson says. “She’s really up there — she’s 20, 25 feet in the air.”
This also informed the 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. Scouting their gaudy, sunny California home proved crucial.
“An obvious choice would’ve been something modern and very plain and fancy, but we ended up choosing this mid-century home, which is a little tacky, but also stuck in the ‘70s,” Rév says. “It’s probably a strange choice, but also it gives us possibilities.” This goes especially for when Cassie pivots to making OnlyFans content to bolster their income. “OnlyFans has its own aesthetic and how you elevate that aesthetic to the show’s aesthetic is a challenge, I’m not going to lie,” Rév says.
“[Cassie] has got her dog house and her little dog ears and the nose, and that has its own humor, but what makes the scene is the fact that her housekeeper is the one filming it,” Levinson adds of how they approached her OnlyFans scenes in the premiere. “What we wanted to always find is the other layer of absurdity that we’re able to tie into it so that we’re not too inside of her fantasy or illusion — the gag is to jump out, to break the wall.”
This meant juxtaposing the iPhone visuals with how Euphoria makes its images: “Some of these scenes we only lit with these ring lights that she would use…. When you’re inside, it’s a beautiful, glowing front light, but then you jump out of it and it’s just a pool of light and everything surrounding it is dark. It’s just gnarly and jarring,” Levinson says. “We wanted to capture what she’s trying to show the audience and be inside of it, but then also pull back wider and see how depressing it is.”
“Shooting it on a 65mm camera with our lenses on our film stock — it gives it a certain look, and I think that’s an interesting pairing there,” Rév adds. “Doing an OnlyFans aesthetic with these tools is something that excites me.”
The first episode ends with Rue being put in a life-or-death roll of the dice with Alamo, as he tests her fate after Laurie’s seeming betrayal. Rue survives narrowly, letting out an ecstatic gasp in celebration of her survival — no matter the uncertainty of what comes next. As the season unfurls from here, that moment — sitting on that edge 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 costar Eric Dane and former executive producer Kevin Turen, both of whom also died between the release of seasons two and three.
“I wanted to tell a story about the step of surrendering our will and our lives 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 of its tragedies and everything, as a blessing.”
Euphoria airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.
