Euphoria Creator Sam Levinson Unpacks That Unavoidable Finale and Ending His Hit HBO Series

[This story contains MAJOR spoilers fromthe season three finale of Euphoria, “In God We Trust.”]

Sam Levinson had a different ending for Rue, Zendaya‘s starring character in Euphoria, before the death of star Angus Cloud. Cloud, who played drug dealer Fezco in the first two seasons of HBO‘s buzzy series, died in 2023 at age 25 from a fentanyl-related overdose while Levinson was working on the third — and what would become final — season that released Sunday night.

In the season three finale, titled “In God We Trust,” Zendaya’s opiate addict Rue Bennett dies from fentanyl-laced Percocet given to her by drug kingpin Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), in a move of sadistic revenge for believing she was working with the DEA. Brown eventually gets what he deserves, when Rue’s sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo) kills him in an epic shootout (another scene that changed from its inception, the actor revealed to The Hollywood Reporter).

When speaking on the New York Times‘ Popcast after the finale, Levinson explained that he wrote a different trajectory for Rue during the writers strike of 2023, but that when Cloud died that July, his death sparked the ending viewers ultimately saw — a finale that is the end-end of Euphoria, now also confirmed by HBO.

“I’d always been really concerned about the prevalence of fentanyl. It’s something that we’ve dealt with over the seasons and even in my first film [Another Happy Day(2011)],” said Levinson, who is open about being in recovery from addiction, on the pop culture show. “But once [Cloud] passed away, I had to reconceive the script and I thought, you can’t tell a story about addiction today without the very real consequences. Most people don’t get a second chance. Fentanyl can just take you out in an instant. It wasn’t like when I was growing up; you could literally take pills off the street and you might have a bad trip or something, but you’d be fine. This is something that hits close to home for a lot of people in this country. So it felt like the responsible thing to do.”

The creator and writer confirmed that this finale is intended to be the end, even though the episode hasn’t been explicitly referred to as a “series finale” by the creator or network. “In terms of the story that we set out to tell, which is a story about addiction and its consequences, this feels like the end to me,” Levinson said. The Euphoria story is “a tragic one in the end — but it’s also the truth. If you are experimenting or taking drugs today, it’s very possible it’ll kill you.”

Levinson said that, with the entire ensemble, he set out to pull back “the illusions of the world that we live in, whether it’s ‘likes will fulfill your soul,’ whether it’s love, money, fame, drugs will provide an escape,” referring to story arcs for the other core characters played by Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi, Alexa Demie, Hunter Schafer and Maude Apatow. “It felt like if we were really going to be saying something, we needed to put the audience in the position of a family member who loses someone that they love. And I know how much I love Rue and audiences love Rue. I wanted to mirror that feeling.”

Euphoria viewers were hit with that feeling while watching Rue’s death scene. At first, viewers were made to believe that Fezco — who Levinson kept alive in the show, and put in prison as a consequence of the season two finale — had escaped, and Rue was running out of Ali’s house to go save her friend. But when Rue arrived back at her own house, the sequence of events transformed into a hallucination and was slowly revealed to be her crossing over.

During a finale screening at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater in NYC on Sunday night that THR attended, you could hear a pin drop as the shocked audience watched Rue’s final moment. The sequence also brought back a glimpse at Storm Reid, who played Rue’s sister, and returned Nika King, who plays Rue’s mother, and included unseen footage of Rue and Fezco together in a tribute to Cloud.

Rue’s death hit even harder after a season with her addiction not being front and center. The life-and-death stakes were raised when the former high school series jumped five years to show a now-young adult Rue becoming a drug mule and working for rival kingpins (Martha Kelly’s Laurie also took her own life in the finale). There was a four-year real-time gap between seasons two and three that prompted the jump, as well asrumors of conflict behind the scenes.

“You can go through different phases of addiction where you’re using every single second of a day to feeling like you kind of have your life together. Maybe you smoke a little weed, you drink, but it’s not the most pressing issue,” Levinson explained of Rue’s addiction and death arc in season three. “But that addictive personality is always underneath the surface. And in the end, she’s banged up and her hand got cut. I always thought of it as a window into whatever pain is going on in her psyche. And she feels, ‘OK, I’ll just take one.’ And I always imagine it was the fentanyl that she had smuggled into the country in the first episode [of season three, which foreshadowed her death].”

When speaking about that premiere, Levinson had told THR, “I was really angry about fentanyl, the fact that in 2023, the year Angus died, 73,000 Americans died of fentanyl overdoses. I couldn’t understand what it was about our country that we were allowing so many people to be poisoned.”

Levinson also dedicated his finale introduction speech to Cloud when speaking to the attendees at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater on Sunday, talking about telling a story about addiction and its consequences and how, when life happens between the work, it shapes the story.

“This season we lost Angus. Many of you loved him the way I did. He had such a light that could just fill up a entire room and he deserved more time — a longer, fuller life. But he was taken, like far too many people in this country, by fentanyl,” he said before the screening. “Grief has a way of clarifying what matters. It strips everything down to essentials. Your family, your friends, your faith … But even in the face of unimaginable loss, the decision to keep hoping, to believe in a better world, might be the very thing that can create one.”

When speaking to Popcast, Levinson also defended the sexualization of the series, explained why some of the storylines ended up mirroring real life, and why some characters were minimized.

“From the script, you get a sense of what the role requires. Even when you go up to audition, let’s use the role of Cassie [played by Sweeney], you know the role requires a certain amount of nudity.Are you comfortable?If they’re comfortable, they get the role, then the next layer is the intimacy coordinator. I think it’s a SAG [Screen Actors Guild] rule that if an actor then says, after getting cast,actually, I don’t want to do that, we can’t force them to do a scene. I believe very strongly that the best, most honest performances are when an actor feels free and safe. … So my job is to create the kind of best, most conducive environment for the actor to play this character,” he explained when talking about Sweeney’s OnlyFans storyline.

The creator also called Sweeney a “totally fearless actor,” adding that there’s “such a flexibility in terms of the performance,” especially when it came to nudity in season three for her role as Cassie. “When I first wrote it, I was like, ‘Maybe we shoot all of this and we don’t have any nudity, maybe there’s ways to shoot around certain things?’” Levinson recalled. “And she [Sweeney] looked at me and she was like, ‘Are you kidding? I’m playing an OnlyFans model. You’re telling me you’re going to like, skirt around it?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s a fair point.’”

When asked specifically about the creative visions for Nate (Elordi’s character, who died a horrific death in the penultimate episode) and Jules (Schafer’s character, who had less and less screen time), Levinson said that logistically the 178-day shoot was challenging, in addition to keeping the shoot on budget, but that “in terms of the story, I tend to look at it more like a film instead of a television show. Sometimes a character takes a front seat, sometimes they take a back seat, sometimes they’re in an episode, sometimes they’re not.”

With Nate, specifically, he said “all of the wheeling and dealing that he does is the engine for Cassie’s story, which becomes the bigger arc of the season, as opposed to each episode we’re going to delve into his specific struggles. I think because audiences know the history of these characters, everything is always a little, like — it gets compared to what you know.”

Ultimately, Levinson said he didn’t view the ending to be pessimistic.

“At what point do you just say something is evil? If you’re selling poison to kids and you’re killing them, it’s evil. And what do you do in that situation? How do you confront it? How do you deal with it?” he said of the anger explored through Domingo’s Ali after Rue’s death.

But then he continued: “We live in a pretty fucked up world. It’s what Lexi [Maude’s character] says in that conversation with Cassie where she read the Bible. She doesn’t really understand it, but she does know people are always dying and you’ve just got to go on. There’s definitely a fragility there. But it’s a renewal of sorts. If we can kind of get our shit together and take care of our loved ones and maybe believe in something a little greater than ourselves, then we can carve out a future.”

Euphoriaseason threeis streaming on HBO Max. Read more of THR‘s finale coverage here, along with our cover stories with Alexa Demie and Colman Domingo.