Jenni Mortimer with the latest entertainment news. Video / Ryan Bridge TODAY
Even the Harry Potter franchise hasn’t been dogged by quite as many controversies as HBO’s Euphoria. The hit X-rated drama about nihilistic, drug-addled teenagers in modern-day Los Angeles returns for its years-delayed third season this month after much speculation that it wouldn’t – and shouldn’t – come back at all.For its breakout superstars Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi, Euphoria is their poisoned chalice: it single-handedly launched their careers, and has tormented them ever since.
When the first season launched in 2019, it faced accusations of glamorising drug use, “creepy” portrayals of teenage sex and minimising statutory rape, with America’s Parents Television Council demanding that HBO cancel the show. By its second season, its “tortured genius” creator Sam Levinson was battling claims of a “toxic” working environment which saw background actors “dropping like flies”. He fell out with his muse, co-producer and the show’s biggest star, Zendaya, who in turn feuded with the show’s other giant talent Sydney Sweeney. Throughout the production, several cast and crew members have quit – three have died.
Yet, despite everything, the show remains a jewel in HBO’s crown, having become its second-most watched show in 20 years after Game of Thrones, with almost 19 million viewers for its season two premiere – more than doubling the first season. It became the most-tweeted show of the decade (30 million tweets for season one alone) and spawned a cult-like fandom as fervent and parasocial as those of the world’s most famous pop stars, while its moody lighting, outfits and gem-stone encrusted make-up launched an entire Gen Z aesthetic.
Though provocative, the show’s superb acting made for prestige TV: Zendaya, playing despondent drug addict Rue, became the youngest person to win an Emmy after season one, then won a second for season two. Such is Euphoria’s popularity that even its hot potato reputation wouldn’t stop a savvy star coming on board, with Sharon Stone, musician Rosalia and Natasha Lyonne all joining its new season, which jumps five years since season two’s high-school finale to see the characters all grown-up and trying to make it in the real world.
Sam Levinson, son of Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson (Rain Man and Good Morning, Vietnam), had the idea for Euphoria in the years after recovering from drug addiction. Growing up in Hollywood, he appeared in a few of his father’s films and, by 16, had become addicted to opiates. He had “made peace that drugs would kill me and that there was no reason to fight it” until he entered rehab at 19 and got clean in his mid-20s.
Euphoria creator Sam Levinson is the son of Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson. Photo / Getty Images
When he was called into a meeting with HBO after sending in a script on spec, he was asked to use these experiences to write a show based around an Israeli series HBO had just optioned, Ophoria, which saw disaffected 1990s teenagers using sex, drugs, porn and violence to give their lives meaning. The nihilism of Ophoria squared with the nihilism of his own youth, and so Levinson wrote himself into a group of middle-class high-schoolers in LA, projecting his past on to a new generation numbed to the world by the relentless churn of 24-hour news. Levinson has described the show’s narrator, Rue, an opiate addict played by Zendaya, as a “female version of myself”.
The fact that a straight white man in his 30s was essentially writing himself into a diverse set of characters of mostly young women, including a black woman and a transgender woman, immediately riled viewers, the majority of whom were women. The first episode begins with a prolonged, intimate close-up of a topless Sydney Sweeney, whose overt sexuality becomes her character Cassie’s defining feature.
Overt sexuality becomes the defining feature of Cassie, played by Sydney Sweeney. Photo / HBO
Viewers described Cassie as “a vessel for the male gaze”, while the LA Times described the show as misogynistic, with Levinson’s “voyeuristic, adult male gaze into the life of sexy, young, vulnerable girls” disturbingly present. Several of the show’s female stars have voiced their discomfort at Levinson’s nude scenes.
The characters’ understanding of sex is clearly heavily influenced by porn – the New Yorker called the show “pornographically sad” – with girls often violated and degraded. In one scene, Sweeney is choked. In another, Rue narrates that her friend Maddy had sex age 14 with a grown man, saying “sounds rapey in retrospect but she was definitely the one in control”. While arguably Rue was knowingly revealing Maddy’s delusion, the line was accused of “normalising statutory rape”.
In one of the show’s most shocking moments, we see transgender character Jules, played by Hunter Schafer, raped by an older man, played by the late Eric Dane, including a disturbing close-up of his erect penis (a prosthetic). “I feel the way it depicts Jules is exploitative and dehumanising,” reads a post on X. The Atlantic called the show “so relentlessly provocative that it prompts the question: Who is this supposed to be for?” Meanwhile older viewers felt perturbed that they were essentially watching scenes of underage sex, despite the adult actors. When it emerged that Levinson wrote his episodes alone, with no writers room, the backlash swelled.
Zendaya as Rue in Euphoria. Levinson has described her character as a female version of himself. Photo / HBO
Euphoria’s relentless sex and nudity was subsumed into a greater moral panic – led in part by the parents of its teenage fans – about the show’s glamorisation of drugs. As Levinson himself said: “There are going to be parents who are going to be totally f---ing freaked out”. America’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education programme said Euphoria “chooses to misguidedly glorify and erroneously depict high school student drug use, addiction, anonymous sex, violence and other destructive behaviours as common and widespread in today’s world”.
While Zendaya’s Rue is ravaged by addiction, other characters use drugs recreationally. There was a worry that the show’s stylised aesthetic – beautiful, rich girls snorting cocaine while their faces glittered in dazzling make-up under moody lighting – would make party drugs look aspirational. When asked about this in various interviews, Levinson said: “I think it’s crucial that film and television portray addiction in an honest way. That we show the allure of drugs, and the relief they can bring, because that’s ultimately what makes them so destructive.”
Disturbingly, though, several cast members on the show were themselves battling drug addiction. Musician-turned-actor Dominic Fike, who played a friend of Rue’s, revealed that he was high for most of the scenes used in season two’s final cut and, despite being given a sober coach, was almost fired from the production after continually turning up on drugs. “I was a drug addict and coming on to a show that’s, you know, mainly about drugs, is very difficult,” he said in 2023. “That’s entertainment dude. They give you a bunch of money and they’re like, ‘Yeah, figure it out bud. Sink or swim.”
Angus Cloud, a non-actor cast off the street as Rue’s oddly charming drug dealer Fezco, was also given a sober companion, with HBO paying for 30 days of rehab. Levinson has said he felt Cloud, who said he was cast because “I looked like I could be a drug dealer”, had no real motivation to get clean because he had no real motivation to live. Cloud, who had become a fan favourite, died of an accidental overdose in 2023, aged 25. For some fans, there was no reason to watch another season of Euphoria without him.
Euphoria star Angus Cloud, who died of an accidental overdose in 2023, aged 25. Photo / HBO
More controversies piled up in the years between the second and third season, most of them centred around Levinson, whose ability to provoke fan ire had earned him a kind of celebrity status unheard of for a writer-director with just one show under his belt. First, there was an expose in the Daily Beast, in which sources revealed 18-hour workdays and several complaints made to SAG-AFTRA over production failing to provide them meals on time and refusing to let people use the bathroom. (HBO denied the claims, stating that the production was “in full compliance with all safety guidelines and guilt protocols”.)
The expose also fanned the flames of rumoured tensions between Levinson and cast member Barbie Ferreira, playing an insecure high schooler who writes smutty fan-fiction from her bedroom, who allegedly walked off set, prompting Levinson to cut back her screen time. She quit before the third season, saying her character Kat had “nowhere to go”. Though she later said there was no feud, some of her quotes speak for themselves: “I really wanted to be able to not be the fat best friend… Sam writes for things that he relates to. I don’t think he relates to Kat. I relate to Kat.” Again and again, it seemed like Levinson had a woman problem.
Barbie Ferreira quit Euphoria because she thought her character Kat had ‘nowhere to go’. Photo / HBO
Discourse around Euphoria hit fever pitch in spring 2023, when fans were starting to wonder if there would ever be a third season. It had been a year since season two and the cast hadn’t begun filming, with rumours that Levinson – whose involvement had been announced in a new HBO show The Idol, billed as “the next Euphoria” – hadn’t even written the script. Then Rolling Stone published a bombshell expose with 13 sources alleging that The Idol, starring Lily-Rose Depp as a hyper-sexualised pop star controlled by a seedy svengali, had gone “disgustingly off the rails”, with scripts reading like “torture porn” and a “rape fantasy”. Reportedly, as Levinson had become more involved, the show’s original director, Amy Seimetz, had been ousted, with her more feminist script. To jaded Euphoria fans, this felt all too familiar.
When The Idol was finally released, in early summer, earning some of the most abysmal reviews of any TV show ever, Levinson had become a truly excoriated figure. Notably Zendaya, who had by this point become a Hollywood star thanks to Spider-Man and Dune, and prided herself on a pristine reputation, was tainted by association. She had become a co-producer on the second season and she and Levinson were allegedly “thick as thieves”. After the stink of The Idol, fans, concerned that she was enabling a misogynist, were urging her to quit.
According to yet another bombshell expose, this time in the Hollywood Reporter mid-2024, Zendaya – horrified by the Rolling Stone article and frustrated by the delays with Euphoria, which was forcing her to turn other projects down – had in fact requested crisis talks with Levinson and HBO.
By the start of 2025, many fans felt the show was simply too doomed to continue, yet still key cast members Zendaya, Elordi and Sweeney promised it would, all the while seeming somewhat embarrassed by its existence. Elordi, in particular, keen to be taken as a serious actor in the vein of Daniel Day Lewis, seemed as conflicted talking about Euphoria as Robert Pattinson remains about Twilight.
In spring, filming was finally confirmed, and a new villain emerged. Instead of Levinson, it was blue-eyed, blonde-haired Sweeney, who was accused of promoting “white supremacy” following a viral American Eagle ad built around the pun “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”, and a voting record that suggested she was Republican. Sources alleged that Zendaya, a mixed-race woman who vocally opposed Trump, was now refusing to do press calls with Sweeney or stand next to her on the red carpet.
There have been rumours of a rift between Sydney Sweeney and Zendaya, pictured here in 2022. Photo / HBO
Perhaps tellingly, with the third season a mere two weeks away, there have been no ensemble press interviews, with all lead cast members’ muted promotion so far remaining just one re-post of its trailer. For someone who has historically done so much press, Levinson has this time around remained conspicuously silent. In two further blows to the production that seem to cement its reputation as television’s most cursed show, cast member Eric Dane died from motor neurone disease last month, while just a few weeks ago, the show’s lauded composer Labrinth abruptly quit. The British producer posted a cryptic statement on Instagram that read: “I’m done with this industry. F--- Columbia. Double f--- Euphoria. I’m out. Thank you and good night.”
And yet, for all its chaos – and for all the headaches it has given HBO – Euphoria remains a phenomenon. If its new (and surely last) season succeeds, the show will be remembered as a culture-defining juggernaut that established three of the defining screen talents of their generation, with a tortured genius at its helm. If not, then Sam Levinson may find it hard to work again. Some might argue that wouldn’t be so bad.
