{"id":514635,"date":"2026-06-02T12:22:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-02T12:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/514635\/"},"modified":"2026-06-02T12:22:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-02T12:22:16","slug":"euphoria-finale-rues-death-end-of-show-explained-by-creator","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/514635\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Euphoria’ Finale: Rue’s Death, End of Show Explained By Creator"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\t[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from\u00a0the season three finale of Euphoria, \u201cIn God We Trust.\u201d]<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n\tSam Levinson<\/a> had a different ending for Rue, Zendaya<\/a>\u2018s starring character in Euphoria, before the death of star Angus Cloud<\/a>. Cloud, who played drug dealer Fezco in the first two seasons of HBO<\/a>\u2018s buzzy series, died<\/a> in 2023 at age 25 from a fentanyl-related overdose while Levinson was working on the third \u2014 and what would become final \u2014 season that released Sunday night.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the season three finale, titled \u201cIn God We Trust,\u201d Zendaya\u2019s opiate addict Rue Bennett dies <\/a>from fentanyl-laced Percocet given to her by drug kingpin Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje<\/a>), in a move of sadistic revenge for believing she was working with the DEA. Brown eventually gets what he deserves, when Rue\u2019s sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo<\/a>) kills him in an epic shootout (another scene that changed from its inception, the actor revealed<\/a> to The Hollywood Reporter).<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen speaking on the New York Times\u2018 Popcast<\/a> 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 \u2014 a finale that is the end-end of Euphoria, now also confirmed by HBO.<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019d always been really concerned about the prevalence of fentanyl. It\u2019s something that we\u2019ve dealt with over the seasons and even in my first film [Another Happy Day\u00a0(2011)],\u201d said Levinson, who is open about being in recovery from addiction, on the pop culture show. \u201cBut once [Cloud] passed away, I had to reconceive the script and I thought, you can\u2019t tell a story about addiction today without the very real consequences. Most people don\u2019t get a second chance. Fentanyl can just take you out in an instant. It wasn\u2019t 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\u2019d 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe creator and writer confirmed that this finale is intended to be the end, even though the episode hasn\u2019t been explicitly referred to as a \u201cseries finale\u201d by the creator or network. \u201cIn 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,\u201d Levinson said. The Euphoria story is \u201ca tragic one in the end \u2014 but it\u2019s also the truth. If you are experimenting or taking drugs today, it\u2019s very possible it\u2019ll kill you.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLevinson said that, with the entire ensemble, he set out to pull back \u201cthe illusions of the world that we live in, whether it\u2019s \u2018likes will fulfill your soul,\u2019 whether it\u2019s love, money, fame, drugs will provide an escape,\u201d referring to story arcs for the other core characters<\/a> played by Sydney Sweeney<\/a>, Jacob Elordi<\/a>, Alexa Demie<\/a>, Hunter Schafer and Maude Apatow. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEuphoria viewers were hit with that feeling while watching Rue\u2019s death scene. At first, viewers were made to believe that Fezco \u2014 who Levinson kept alive in the show, and put in prison as a consequence of the season two finale<\/a> \u2014 had escaped, and Rue was running out of Ali\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tDuring 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\u2019s final moment. The sequence also brought back a glimpse at Storm Reid, who played Rue\u2019s sister, and returned Nika King<\/a>, who plays Rue\u2019s mother, and included unseen footage of Rue and Fezco together in a tribute to Cloud<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tZendaya in the finale of Euphoria.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tHBO<\/p>\n

\n\tRue\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 as\u00a0rumors of conflict behind the scenes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou can go through different phases of addiction where you\u2019re 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\u2019s not the most pressing issue,\u201d Levinson explained<\/a> of Rue\u2019s addiction and death arc in season three. \u201cBut that addictive personality is always underneath the surface. And in the end, she\u2019s 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, \u2018OK, I\u2019ll just take one.\u2019 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<\/a>].\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen speaking about that premiere, Levinson had told THR, \u201cI was really angry about fentanyl, the fact that in 2023, the year Angus died, 73,000 Americans died of fentanyl overdoses. I couldn\u2019t understand what it was about our country that we were allowing so many people to be poisoned.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLevinson 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. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis 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 \u2014 a longer, fuller life. But he was taken, like far too many people in this country, by fentanyl,\u201d he said before the screening. \u201cGrief has a way of clarifying what matters. It strips everything down to essentials. Your family, your friends, your faith \u2026 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen speaking to Popcast<\/a>, Levinson also defended<\/a> the sexualization of the series, explained why some of the storylines ended up mirroring real life, and why some characters were minimized.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cFrom the script, you get a sense of what the role requires. Even when you go up to audition, let\u2019s use the role of Cassie [played by Sweeney], you know the role requires a certain amount of nudity.\u00a0Are you comfortable?\u00a0If they\u2019re comfortable, they get the role, then the next layer is the intimacy coordinator. I think it\u2019s a SAG [Screen Actors Guild] rule that if an actor then says, after getting cast,\u00a0actually, I don\u2019t want to do that, we can\u2019t force them to do a scene. I believe very strongly that the best, most honest performances are when an actor feels free and safe. \u2026 So my job is to create the kind of best, most conducive environment for the actor to play this character,\u201d he explained when talking about Sweeney\u2019s OnlyFans storyline.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe creator also called Sweeney a \u201ctotally fearless actor,\u201d adding that there\u2019s \u201csuch a flexibility in terms of the performance,\u201d especially when it came to nudity in season three for her role as Cassie. \u201cWhen I first wrote it, I was like, \u2018Maybe we shoot all of this and we don\u2019t have any nudity, maybe there\u2019s ways to shoot around certain things?’\u201d Levinson recalled. \u201cAnd she [Sweeney] looked at me and she was like, \u2018Are you kidding? I\u2019m playing an OnlyFans model. You\u2019re telling me you\u2019re going to like, skirt around it?\u2019 And I was like, \u2018Yeah, OK, that\u2019s a fair point.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen asked specifically about the creative visions for Nate (Elordi\u2019s character, who died a horrific death in the penultimate episode<\/a>) and Jules (Schafer\u2019s 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 \u201cin 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\u2019re in an episode, sometimes they\u2019re not.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tWith Nate, specifically, he said \u201call of the wheeling and dealing that he does is the engine for Cassie\u2019s story, which becomes the bigger arc of the season, as opposed to each episode we\u2019re going to delve into his specific struggles. I think because audiences know the history of these characters, everything is always a little, like \u2014 it gets compared to what you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tUltimately, Levinson said he didn\u2019t view the ending to be pessimistic. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cAt what point do you just say something is evil? If you\u2019re selling poison to kids and you\u2019re killing them, it\u2019s evil. And what do you do in that situation? How do you confront it? How do you deal with it?\u201d he said of the anger explored through Domingo\u2019s Ali after Rue\u2019s death. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut then he continued: \u201cWe live in a pretty fucked up world. It\u2019s what Lexi [Maude\u2019s character] says in that conversation with Cassie where she read the Bible. She doesn\u2019t really understand it, but she does know people are always dying and you\u2019ve just got to go on. There\u2019s definitely a fragility there. But it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEuphoria\u00a0<\/a>season three<\/a>\u00a0is streaming on HBO Max. Read more of THR\u2018s finale coverage here<\/a>, along with our cover stories with Alexa Demie<\/a> and Colman Domingo.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"[This story contains MAJOR spoilers from\u00a0the season three finale of Euphoria, \u201cIn God We Trust.\u201d] Sam Levinson had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514636,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[265],"tags":[77482,77483,18,117,12264,9540,19,17,11490,77487,3970,128,18238],"class_list":["post-514635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-angus-cloud","tag-colman-domingo","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-euphoria","tag-hbo","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jacob-elordi","tag-sam-levinson","tag-sydney-sweeney","tag-tv","tag-zendaya"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}