HBO’s once-beloved teen drama “Euphoria” has transformed into a violent, Quentin Tarantino-style crime thriller in its third season — a mutation now complete with a gruesome death for one of its main characters.
In the season’s seventh and penultimate episode, titled “Rain or Shine,” Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) is buried alive in a wooden coffin (hello, “Kill Bill”) as revenge for his outstanding debt to Naz (Jack Topalian), a local businessman and mob-like figure.
Nate’s wife, Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney), is forced to come up with $1 million in 72 hours, lest Nate dies underground of dehydration. However, before she can succeed or fail, a rattlesnake slithers through the coffin’s airhole.
Once Cassie does get a chance to dig up her husband, she finds Nate’s body purplish, bloated, and bloodshot, the poisonous snake coiled around it. The final shot of Nate’s face could be ripped straight from a horror film.
Nate has been a principal focus of “Euphoria” since its premiere in 2019. He was introduced as a manipulative high-school athlete with wells of pent-up rage; in season one alone, Nate choked his girlfriend, blackmailed a classmate, and plotted to send an innocent man to prison. He got away with it all.
Season three features a five-year time jump, thrusting the show’s ensemble into the harsh light of young adulthood. Many fans have been eager to see Nate finally pay for his crimes — a fact the show’s creator and showrunner, Sam Levinson, said was top of mind while plotting the character’s fate.
“There’s this kind of funny thing where I know what the audience wants in terms of justice or karma and with that in mind, I always think, ‘Well, how can I give it to them?” Levinson told Esquire. “How can I give them what they want, but make it so horrific and anxiety-inducing that by the time it happens, the audience isn’t so sure they wanted it?”
Levinson said he hoped the audience would feel complicit in Nate’s suffering this season, which also involved having multiple body parts cut off in his conflict with Naz.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, you wanted him to get his comeuppance…? OK,” Levinson continued. “You end up going, ‘Oh God, I don’t know. Should he have had it better? Did he deserve it?’ Those kinds of questions are always exciting to pose to the audience.”
Levinson has been both praised and criticized for relying on shock value and rage bait in his work, especially in “Euphoria,” which delights in portraying its young characters — especially the women — in vulnerable, compromising positions, both literal and figurative. (Sweeney, who’s had the most nude scenes of her costars, has defended Levinson from backlash, saying the goal of “Euphoria” is “making people uncomfortable.”)
Levinson also prefers to use practical effects to achieve his desired results. He revealed to Esquire that while filming Nate’s death sequence, they used real rattlesnakes on set. He said the animal wranglers warned him that the snakes’ venomous bites would kill a human in about an hour, but “the nearest hospital’s an hour and a half away.”
However, the snake placed in the actual coffin with Elordi was a boa constrictor with a fake rattler attached to its tail.
“The snakes were rattling, which is really alarming when you’re locked in a box,” Elordi said in a behind-the-scenes interview for HBO.
For his part, Elordi has soared to proper celebrity status since first appearing onscreen as the love-to-hate Nate, starring in movies like “Saltburn,” “Wuthering Heights,” and Guillermo del Toro’s “Frankenstein,” for which he earned his first Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.
“Nate is someone who’s made so many mistakes and made so many dark choices. It’s cool to see it all come to what it’s come to,” Elordi said. “This show is a massive part of, not just my career, but my life. It’s been amazing, and I’m so proud, being a part of this.”
The much-anticipated season three finale will air on Sunday, May 31. Although Nate’s fate has been sealed, he leaves Cassie and the rest of the “Euphoria” crew in a range of precarious situations — largely at the mercy of crime lords, drug dealers, and murderous creditors impatient to collect. Given the stakes, Nate may not be the only character who meets a premature end.
“They’re in the real world and the consequences are real. There’s no safety net,” Levinson told Esquire of the season’s major themes. “I like this Wild West, frontier aspect to it where you can make something of yourself, but you’re going to have to live with the consequences.”
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