Being the hot series, the one that the public has to watch to stay up to date and be able to participate in the cultural conversation, means being under scrutiny, at least at present. In the case of Euphoria, this means piling up one controversy after another. Any statement and any action by the actors has an impact on the image of this adolescent drama that, among other topics, talks about drug addiction, toxic romantic and sexual relationships that young people enter into and sexual identity, this in part for the involvement of Hunter Schafer as an actress and screenwriter. And, considering that Dominic Fike is now making headlines for an abuse of narcotics that went beyond the script, here is a compilation of the controversies carried out by the Euphoria team so far.
Dominic Fike entered Euphoria in the second season. Creator Sam Levinson cast him as Elliot, a kid with a drug use similar to Rue’s (Zendaya). And, as is now known, the actor bore more than a reasonable resemblance to his character: “He was a drug addict and coming to a series that, you know, is all about drugs was very difficult,” he revealed in an interview. to Apple Music in which he described himself as “deeply addicted to many drugs.”
Sam Levinson even got him a sober coach, a person who could help him stay sober, but it didn’t work out because he was high: “I was so fucked up for a lot of the series.” According to Fike, the producers ended up using scenes in which he was really stoned in the final cut, but this does not mean that they accepted his behavior: he received an ultimatum that he had to be professional on set: “That’s the way he is.” entertainment. They give you a bunch of money and say, “Fix it, man. Sink or swim.”
Luckily for Fike, Levinson appreciated his acting input in season two: he’ll be in season three. Now that he is sober, he acknowledges that he has a “better dynamic” with the team.
In February, Angus Cloud was in the vehicle that collided with a Toyota in Los Angeles and then sped away, or at least this was the hypothesis that the police were investigating. While no further details of the case have been released, Cloud was involved in another controversy just two months later when Diomi Cordero, who had been his manager, accused him of owing him up to $60,000 in commissions on social networks.
They met, according to Cordero, at a rehab center where he worked as a mental health technician when, learning that Cloud was committed to a career as an artist, he changed careers to become his manager. But in February 2022, he resigned from this job due to “the verbal abuse, emotional distress and severe drug addiction” of whom he had been his client.
The decision would have been made a month after Cloud’s roommates called him because he had suffered an overdose, to which Cordero had to revive him: “When he regained consciousness, Agus vomited in my face.” They were more statements that conveyed a clear idea: certain members of the Euphoria cast allegedly had key points in common with the plot of the series.
In January of last year, shortly before the premiere of the second season of Euphoria, the media echoed a rumor: Barbie Ferreira had argued in the middle of filming with Sam Levinson, the author of the HBO series, and to then he had cut out her role. Later it was said that the actress, who played Kat, had directly left the shoot on two occasions due to disagreements with her boss.
And, although Ferreira tried to dismiss this information as rumors, it was soon shown that something had happened when he announced that he would not be in the third season. “She really wanted to not be the fat best friend,” she acknowledged on Dax Shephard’s Armchair expert podcast. The problem, according to the actress, is that Levinson “writes about things that she feels related to” and simply didn’t feel this kind of empathy for the character of Kat.
For some time now, journalism in the United States has been obsessed with the looks of directors and whether the gender of the director behind the cameras determines the way in which both men and women are represented in their work. With Sam Levinson, there was no doubt: he was interested in representing the teenagers in his series from lust, at least in the case of Cassie, the character played by Sydney Sweeney.
“There are times when Cassie was supposed to go shirtless and I was like, ‘I don’t think this is necessary here,’ to Sam,” he told The Independent. Luckily for her, Levinson took these suggestions into account and, according to Sweeney herself, replied that “okay, we don’t need it”. For this reason, she never felt “pressured” because when she did not want to undress, she did not force her to, and she also had an intimacy coordinator to cope with the scenes in which she was most vulnerable.
She was not the only actress who revealed that she had to ask Levinson to cut nude scenes for her. Minka Kelly, who had a supporting role in the second season, was shocked when she found out that on her first day of shooting she had to go out without clothes. “I would love to do this scene but I think we can keep the dress on,” she told Levinson, and he accepted her proposal.
And Chloe Cherry, who plays Faye, found herself in a similar situation. She arrived at the shooting of the second season and automatically had to interpret a scene totally nude. “It would have been more comfortable if we had more time to get to know each other,” she said of arriving on the HBO shoot and having to be so vulnerable in front of the whole crew.
