If certain corners of the internet are to be believed, last Tuesday night, Zendaya arrived fashionably late to the Los Angeles premiere of her salacious HBO series Euphoria. She posed for photographers, briefly hugged the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, with the strained affection of a child being asked to embrace their cousin who smells, then leapt into a waiting car headed to parts unknown. But in fact, Zendaya didn’t speed off as rapidly as possible from the scene of the crime (or, as it’s also known, the third season of TV’s most depleting exercise in pop-video nihilism). Instead, she giddily chatted with her castmates, then took her seat at the TCL Chinese Theatre to watch her character guzzle down bags of fentanyl. Perhaps things in Euphoria-ville weren’t quite as bad as some had imagined?
That said, it might not matter much. Since it debuted in the summer of 2019 – its 26 episodes have stretched across a pandemic, multiple international wars and two Trump presidencies – Euphoria has become just as famous for its fictional stories of addiction and all-American depravity as it has its behind-the-scenes drama, whether it’s accurately reported or entirely made up by gossips and TikTok teens. Are Zendaya and her co-star Sydney Sweeney feuding? Is Euphoria luridly exploiting its young cast? Is Levinson purely bad vibes or just woefully misunderstood? Season three – reportedly the show’s last – has now arrived amid a deluge of questions like this, with answers not exactly forthcoming. And with so much angst and fury flowing through its bloodstream, it’ll be a bit of a relief when it finally concludes.
Perhaps it was always going to be this way. Euphoria started at an 11, and has only increased in volatility since. Think of it as a nightmarish stars-and-stripes Skins told from the perspective of Zendaya’s Rue Bennett, an introspective, mentally ill teenager with a drug problem. Surrounding her in season one were a cast of seemingly thousands, all of whom were tussling with forms of self-abuse – Sweeney’s Cassie submits herself to all kinds of sexual exploitation; Jacob Elordi’s Nate is a carnally confused chaos demon; Barbie Ferreira’s Kat is a camgirl with body issues.
Levinson may have been running through a laundry list of old Jerry Springer topics (Kids out of control! Porn-sick junkies! Trans teens and trans fetishists collide!), but he had created something undeniably alluring. Euphoria was a phenomenon, second only to Game of Thrones in HBO’s most-watched rankings by the launch of its second season in 2022, and inhaled by an army of (for the most part) young people more than happy to give in to its sleazy charm. Designed to infuriate and horrify and turn on, Euphoria got the job done.
It was also ground zero for a new breed of parasocial television fandom, which has since come to define audience responses for everything from the smutty hockey soap Heated Rivalry to the medical drama The Pitt. Viewers essentially came up with fanfic in their heads about Levinson and the show’s stars, creating narratives that quickly spiralled out of control. Sweeney expressed her admiration for Levinson in an interview with The Independent and the usefulness of their conversations about her many nude scenes on the show – but, moving the goalposts, some fans decided that Levinson shouldn’t be writing so many nude scenes for Sweeney in the first place. Interviews by two of the show’s guest stars (Minka Kelly and Chloe Cherry) in which they expressed personal discomfort with some of the nudity they were originally asked to perform, but which was softened by the time cameras rolled, only added further fuel to that fire. So too were reports of a rumoured fallout between Levinson and Ferreira (who announced her exit from the series after season two concluded), and an article in The Daily Beast about the gruellingly long shooting hours for the show.
It always seemed a bit more nuanced than the internet declared it to be – if anyone who’s worked on Euphoria has made actual complaints about Levinson, the public doesn’t know about it, while Sweeney and Kelly both said that Levinson was immediately receptive to their ideas to cut back on the nudity initially asked of them. Cherry’s discomfort was flagged by one of her co-stars, which sparked necessary questions about power dynamics on set (Cherry, unlike Sweeney or Kelly, was not an established actor when cast on the show). But it’s also no smoking gun, either. It is true, though, that Levinson was ultimately granted enormous amounts of creative control over Euphoria, writing and directing every episode of the show’s divisive second season. And this was despite claims in a 2024 Hollywood Reporter piece that he was overspending on each episode and lacked the firm, decisive business sense of a more seasoned TV showrunner.
Four years have separated seasons two and three, and in that time Levinson has become even more of a question mark. The return of Euphoria was reportedly delayed due to its key cast being tied up elsewhere (Zendaya, Sweeney and Elordi are all now enormously in-demand movie stars), but also due to prolonged behind-the-scenes handwringing. That aforementioned Hollywood Reporter piece suggested that Levinson was so distracted by his involvement in The Idol – an eye-wateringly expensive vanity project for the pop star The Weeknd that crashed and burned upon release in 2023 – that Zendaya organised a meeting with HBO executives to vent her frustration. Further stories alleged that Zendaya, a producer on Euphoria, was unhappy with Levinson’s suggestions for Rue’s season three plotline. She wanted a now-sober Rue to find a job as a surrogate mother (?); he wanted Rue to start working as a private detective (??).
For such a famous person, Zendaya is a bit of a closed book – she gives little away about her politics, her creative choices, or her professional relationships, and has never directly commented on rumours of discord with Levinson.
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But even with that in mind it is clear that something has gone on between her and Levinson, with their once loudly symbiotic creative partnership (they collaborated on the pandemic-era Netflix film Malcolm & Marie, too) now largely evaporated. Zendaya has barely promoted Euphoria season three, its first mention on her Instagram arriving just 13 days before its launch (she has comparatively promoted the hell out of her A24 movie The Drama, and immediately devoted Insta-space to her forthcoming movies Dune: Part Three and Spider-Man: Brand New Day.) She briefly discussed the show during an appearance on Drew Barrymore’s talk show last week, but through slightly vague platitudes about her gratitude for it.
And Levinson himself has been uncharacteristically quiet about his leading lady of late. Asked by The New York Times last week whether his relationship with Zendaya has changed over the course of the series, Levinson completely deflected the question: “I can’t help but root for everyone in this cast, especially when you’re working with directors like [Christopher] Nolan and Denis [Villeneuve] and [Guillermo] del Toro,” he said. “Just across the board, it’s really exciting.” Riiight.
Levinson also seemed to deflect questions last week about the sudden resignation from the show of the British musician Labrinth, whose trippy, genre-hopping score had always lent Euphoria its dreamy edge. Despite HBO confirming in 2025 that he was returning to score season three – if sharing music duties with the newly hired Hans Zimmer – Labrinth posted to his Instagram in March: “F*** COLUMBIA [Records]. DOUBLE F*** EUPHORIA. IM OUT” [sic]. “We have meaningful relationships with like-minded people and discard them as soon as a bigger opportunity arrives,” he added. “Who the f*** said this is normal or OK?” Asked by Rolling Stone what happened, Levinson replied: “I don’t know. He’s an incredible collaborator and someone who really built the foundation of the sound of Euphoria.” Riiight.
Does Euphoria season three need to exist? It’s debatable. The three episodes – of eight – supplied to journalists are arguably bleaker than anything Levinson has put his name to before, with Rue smuggling drugs in Mexico, Cassie pretending to be a sexy dog on OnlyFans, and Hunter Schafer’s melancholy Jules working as a “sugar baby” for a millionaire. Sigh. That Levinson has claimed season three is a tribute to cast member Angus Cloud, who died from a drug overdose shortly after filming his two-season role as sensitive dealer Fez on the show, feels more worrying than it does sweet – he’s pledged that season three is about finding light and hope in darkness, but based on the content of these three episodes, it won’t materialise quickly.
At least we can find solace in the fact that this will all be over in eight weeks, though. Euphoria had something magical about it in its early stages – a glum kind of ambience that resembled an America’s Next Top Model photo challenge where the theme is soul-sucking misery (“depression, but make it fashion”). But ultimately it burned too bright, swallowed whole by egos, gossip and incredibly melodramatic teenagers on the internet. It became exhausting to watch, and even more exhausting to hear about. Maybe Zendaya isn’t distancing herself from it because of a feud with Levinson. Maybe she’s just distancing herself from it because who in their right mind wouldn’t?
‘Euphoria’ is streaming on HBO in the US and HBO Max in the UK
