The first trailer for “Euphoria” Season 3 is here, arriving ahead of the show’s April 12 premiere on HBO and HBO Max.
It’s quite impressive how they’ve managed to bring back the entire cast for this one, many of whom have graduated to movies since the last season: Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Colman Domingo, and others.
Season 2 closed with Lexi (Maude Apatow) staging a play drawing from the messy realities of her friends’ lives, Nate (Elordi) exposing his dad Cal’s (Dane) illegal sexual activity, and Rue (Zendaya) and Jules (Schafer) seemingly finding their way back to each other as Rue stayed clean.
Fast forward five years, and Season 3 picks up well after high school. Cassie and Nate are now married, living the suburban life, while Rue has relocated to Mexico, trying to pay off her debts to drug dealer Laurie. Meanwhile, creator Sam Levinson has shared that Jules is pursuing art school, and Maddy has landed a job at a Hollywood talent agency.
What’s most notable about this supposed final season is the number of starry newcomers joining the cast: Sharon Stone, Rosalía, Natasha Lyonne, Danielle Deadwyler, and… Eli Roth?
It’s been a long and arduous process to get this show back on the air. In late 2022, Levinson pitched to HBO a third season that would jump ahead five years, with “very compelling” arcs for Sweeney’s Cassie and Elordi’s Nate. However, Zendaya disliked the scripts so much that Levinson had to rewrite the entire thing from scratch.
Even after the rewrite, HBO executives were reportedly still not happy with the final result. They didn’t like Rue’s new arc, which had her sidelined as a private detective, and several other storylines didn’t make sense to them.
This sent Levinson back to the drawing board for a third revision, and according to Variety, the updated scripts still didn’t feel tonally like “Euphoria,” prompting a fourth round of rewrites.
At one point, HBO even explored the idea of replacing Levinson as creative head. There was also the possibility of turning Season 3 into a movie. All of this doesn’t even take into account that, two years since the last season, some of the main actors—Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer—have transitioned fully into the movie business.
Regardless, “Euphoria” is now very much coming back, with many wondering if Levinson has finally found the right formula to justify a third season.
Starring Helen Mirren, the film reimagines the final chapter of Patricia Highsmith’s life through a fictional encounter with an ambitious young literary agent, played by Alden Ehrenreich.