Trivia / Euphoria

• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Jules mentions plans to go to fashion design school, which was Hunter Schafer's original career plan before deciding to go into acting.
  • Just like Rue, Zendaya is half African-American and half Caucasian.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Zendaya sings at the end of both seasons.
  • Dominic Fike sings and plays guitar in the season 2 finale.
• Creator-Driven Successor: To Levinson's film Assassination Nation, which also revolves around teenage characters in a high school setting dominated by the Internet, depicted with flashy visuals, and emphasizing themes including gender and sexuality. The show takes a (relatively) more realistic view on the subject matter rather than using an ironic take on exploitation cinema.
• Dark Horse Victory: Zendaya's Best Actress Drama Emmy win was a minor upset given she was up against serious competition in Jennifer Aniston, Laura Linney and Olivia Colman as well as the previous year's winner, Jodie Comer, and her Killing Eve co-star Sandra Oh.
• Dawson Casting: All of the actors are older than their characters, usually by at least four years (though it is very justified given the sexual behavior among most of the main characters). Averted with Storm Reid, who was 15 during production of Season 1.
• Died During Production: Angus Cloud (Fezco) died in July 2023 before the third season was filmed.
• Fake American: All-American jock Nate Jacobs is played by the Australian Jacob Elordi.
• Fake Mixed Race: The mixed-race Gia is played by Storm Reid, who's fully African-American.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Cassie is a Dirty Coward who tends to run away from physical fights, while Sydney Sweeney, who plays her, is a trained mixed martial artist and probably would be the one person in the cast who would handle herself best in an actual fistfight.
• Playing Against Type: Zendaya as Rue Bennett is a very far cry from the previous kid-friendly roles she was known for on Disney Channel, like Rocky Blue and K.C. Cooper.
• Production Posse:
  • Maude Apatow (Lexi), Lukas Gage (Tyler), and Colman Domingo (Ali) also appeared in creator Levinson's film Assassination Nation.
  • Jennifer Morrison, who also appeared in that film, directed "'03 Bonnie and Clyde".
• Queer Character, Queer Actor:
  • Hunter Schafer, like Jules, is a trans woman. Jules is also bisexual; Schafer originally identified as "closer to what you might call a lesbian" before updating her orientation to "bi or pan or something" in 2021.
  • Bobbi Salvör Menuez and TC are both nonbinary. The same goes for Quintessa Swindell and Anna.
• Romance on the Set:
  • Zendaya (Rue) and Jacob Elordi (Nate) began dating after the first season finished filming, though they broke up.
  • Hunter Schafer and Dominic Fike dated after Season 2.
• Similarly Named Works: Euphoria is also the name of an unrelated (and very NSFW) 2011 visual novel, a video game engine, Loreen's song which won the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest, and a BTS song.
• Troubled Production: Season 2 was supposed to start filming in March 2020, but was indefinitely postponed due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Two episodic specials were eventually produced, focusing primarily on Rue and Jules, to tide over viewers until Season 2 began production; the first of these aired in December 2020, the second in January 2021. Season 2 finally began filming in April 2021 and concluded in November. Despite the delay, Zendaya revealed in an interview that HBO moved up Season 2's air date in the middle of filming, resulting in a rushed production, with Sam Levinson having to write scenes scheduled to shoot literally the next day and episodes undergoing music editing as late as two weeks before airing.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to the creators, Nate was supposed to be murdered by Rue in the pilot episode, his body found in a cornfield.
  • Fez was also going to be killed off in the first season as well, but they changed their minds. According to Angus Cloud himself, him being picked for the role despite being from the streets was a major hint about his longevity.
  • Additionally, Fez being killed was also the original plan for the second season finale but, according to Ashtray's actor Javon Walton, it was changed at the last minute so that Ashtray would be killed instead.
  • Hunter Schafer almost turned down playing Jules, as she was a model during this time, and cited that she was rather shy due to this.
  • According to Zendaya, the second season that existed before the changes induced by the pandemic differs greatly from the final version, to the point where she outright said "there are very few things that remain in the version you’re now seeing," while also reassuring that "the things that didn’t make it definitely needed to die."
    • One of the few things that remain was the painful intervention scene in episode 5, where Rue broke up with Jules, since it was always meant to be a dramatic episode from the start.
    • Instead of Nate, Maddy was going to give the tape to Jules in episode 6, but, because of how little Maddy and Jules interacted, it was decided that Nate would give her the tape instead.
    • There was a character named "Ami" in pre-production for the season slated to be portrayed by Azealia Banks who, according to her description, was a "drug addict" as well as "a stripper" who "hates her boyfriend. Talks shit. Can't read a room. Can make a bad situation worse." Many of these traits would fit Faye's characterization, implying that she evolved from the scrapped character.
    • Due to an alleged fight between Barbie Ferreira and Sam Levinson midway through production, much of Kat's storyline in Season 2 was reduced, hence her being Demoted to Extra. Later evidence speculates that the fight was most likely about a planned storyline of Kat having an eating disorder, to which the body-positive Ferreira had reacted with discomfort, possibly leading to said speculated fight and the dramatic reduction of her role.
    • Samantha was going to have a more minor role, appearing only in one episode, before they decided to expand her role more.
    • Cassie was going to have more nude scenes, but Sydney Sweeney asked Levinson to cut down the amount of such scenes, to which he complied.
    • According to Zendaya, Rue was going to have a more hopeless ending at the end of this season, but it was then decided to give her a more hopeful resolution on the grounds that she had suffered enough.
  • Kelvin Harrison Jr. was cast for a role in the second season, though he later dropped out due to scheduling conflicts stemming from the COVID-19 Pandemic. Had he stayed onboard, he would've been reunited with his Waves co-star (and In-Universe girlfriend) Alexa Demie.
• Write What You Know:
  • Rue's struggle with her drug addiction is transposed from Levinson's own experiences with addiction in his teenage years.
  • According to Barbie Ferreira (Kat), many of the characters are written with their actors' teen years in mind.

---