Why Sydney Sweeney thought she was being killed off Euphoria
- TV Show
Euphoria creator Sam Levinson called Sydney Sweeney between seasons to give her a little heads-up about where her character, Cassie, would be headed in the HBO drama's sophomore season. He told her specifically about that scene in the premiere where Cassie and Jacob Elordi's Nate are having sex in the bathroom, while Cassie's bestie — and Nate's ex, Maddy (Alexa Demie) — is banging on the door, completely unsuspecting of what's happening on the other side of it.
"And the best part," Sweeney says on the latest episode of EW's The Awardist podcast, "is I was at a baseball game [when Sam told me]. And I went under the bleachers trying to hear him, and I wanted to scream as loud as possible. But I couldn't tell anybody."
She kept the secret well. But Sweeney wasn't as concerned with that once she got the script for the episode, in which Nate gives Cassie a ride to a party, drinking beer while driving increasingly faster and faster. At one point, Cassie spills beer all over herself ("I'm soaking wet," she provocatively tells Nate) and unbuckles her seat belt, with Nate still speeding down the road.
"I thought that Sam was killing me. I thought that I was going to get killed," Sweeney says of the moment, which she played into with a little improvised action to up the stakes. "And the hanging out the window, actually, was just me hanging out the window. It was just random and very in the moment. But when I read it, I thought that Cassie was getting killed off. And I was really bummed. But then it turned into this weirdly sensual, dangerous connection between these two characters. And it became what it became."
In addition to what it became on screen, the season was a bonafide cultural phenomenon off screen, taking over social media feeds for days after each episode's airing. One of those moments was after episode 3, when Cassie showed up at school looking like something out of the musical Oklahoma. At least that's what her friends told her.
"I [am] sad to admit that, but I'm going to be honest now, I had to look it up," Sweeney admits of Oklahoma not being part of her pop culture repertoire. "But then, at the same time, I felt like Cassie wouldn't know what Oklahoma was, and so, I didn't want to dig too much into it so that it was truly, she just had no idea what she got herself into. She's, 'Wait, do I look like Oklahoma? What's going on?'"
Sweeney talks about all that and more on the latest episode of EW's The Awardist podcast, and she's featured on the cover (above) of our Awardist emagazine. Listen to the full Awardist podcast interview below or available wherever you listen to podcasts, and subscribe for new episodes every Monday.
Check out more from EW's The Awardist, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis, and our podcast diving into all the highlights from the year's best in TV.
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