Cassie Howard’s story has concluded. But Sydney Sweeney isn’t quite ready to let her go.
Sweeney, already an Emmy nominee for the second season of “Euphoria” in 2022, dove even deeper into the character for the recent third and final season, and she tells Variety that she still thinks about what else Cassie might get up to. Over the course of eight episodes, Cassie, whom we’d last seen as a painfully insecure high-schooler, experienced endless milestones of grown-up life — getting married to boyfriend Nate (Jacob Elordi), facing down her household’s bankruptcy and working as an OnlyFans model to pay the bills (and Nate’s debts). Throughout, the show’s trademark surreality and sense of play allowed Sweeney to act out massive emotional swings and to edge into the absurd, as in a sequence where Cassie strides through Los Angeles, towering over buildings and dominating the men below.
Cassie has been a calling-card role for Sweeney, who had never played a part this meaty when the show launched in 2019. (Last year, Variety declared her turn on “Euphoria” to be one of the greatest TV performances of the century so far.) Since then, Sweeney has scaled up her ambition in acting and producing; never busier, Sweeney could well receive another Emmy nomination this summer. Given the role’s frank sexuality, it’s also sparked yet more of the endless conversation and controversy that seems to trail her. In a conversation while on a break from the Australia set of anime adaptation “Gundam,” Sweeney says that she believes, or hopes, that when separated from the noise of the present moment, “Euphoria” will age well, and that some of her critics might think, as she puts it: “Maybe we all had this very wrong.”
What has the process of letting Cassie go felt like, now that we know “Euphoria” has ended?
Every season, we never knew if we were going to be doing a follow-up season, so by the end of Season 1 or Season 2, I was having this bittersweet moment of continually saying goodbye to Cassie every single time. And because there are such big time jumps between each season, yes, I’m coming back to the same character, but I’m coming back to a different place in her life. You’re getting the groundwork of who this character was that you kept jumping in and out of. It’s a really cool challenge and piece of homework to try to fill in all the gaps. But this is my third time saying goodbye to her — and I feel like the third time’s a charm.
Yes, Cassie changed — but you had a ton of different experiences in your life and career between Seasons 2 and 3, from producing “Anyone But You” to leading “The Housemaid.” How did your partnership with Sam feel different.
Sam’s always been very collaborative — he’s always talked to us about how we feel about different scenes or what’s happening with our storyline. But there’s multiple elements to it: Going back to “Euphoria” has felt like going home. I’ve grown up on the show; it was the first big, huge project that I was part of. Yes, I had recurring roles on “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Sharp Objects,” but this is the first time I felt like, Oh, wow, this is what I’ve always wanted since I was a little girl.
So going back after all these years — with a lot of the same crew, most of the same cast, Sam — you’ve got that home element, that comfort and trust. And then because I’ve had so much growth over the last few years between Season 2 and 3, gaining more confidence in my own self and my own work allowed me to sit in the tent and be more part of the process.
One scene that got a great deal of attention was the homage to “Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,” where Cassie stomps through a city and collides her breasts into a building. I think some people saw that as a set piece that was inflicted on you by Sam, so I’m curious what you thought when you were presented with it.
I thought that it was wild and fun. There’s this aspect of Cassie that feels otherworldly, where she makes grand gestures — you watch a trainwreck, but it’s this beautifully hilarious, emotional trainwreck, and everybody’s along for the ride. The 50-foot woman is such a metaphor for where Cassie is in her life, and what she feels, and what she’s going through. She’s going to destroy everything around her to become famous, even if it breaks her completely. She truly wants love, and she wants people to admire her. Does she get it in the wrong ways? Yes. But it was a fun and creative way to show where Cassie was in her life.
Eddy Chen
Speaking of finding love in the wrong ways, I wanted to talk about Cassie’s marriage to Nate. It feels at first as if she got everything she wanted — and yet we eventually come to wonder if Cassie really loves Nate, or just the image of their lives together.
I think that, unfortunately, she doesn’t know what love is. I think that she had a bad example with her dad. She didn’t grow up with an idea of what a healthy relationship looks like or what a healthy version of love is. Then, throughout high school, she gets treated terribly by boys — she’s just a piece of meat and a token. She learns that all they want from her is her body, so that sets up an element of her not respecting herself and not looking for the right things in guys, because they’re not looking for the right things in her.
Do I think she loved Nate in her own way? Yes. Do I think that it was for the right reasons? Yes and no. She was so deep into it, she didn’t know how to get out. She says it to Maddy — when they meet by the pool, she had to justify everything to herself, and I don’t think she wanted to even think about the idea that maybe they aren’t actually in love. So there’s a lot of layers to that.
The wedding — and especially Cassie and Nate’s dance, as Cassie melts down on the day she’s spent her life dreaming of, having learned about the deep financial hole Nate is in — must have felt especially layered.
You have this juxtaposition where she’s supposed to be happy, and the idea of this relationship she was going to have is completely false. And because she’s always cared about what people have thought about her, the idea of it falling apart around her was even more catastropic. So it was definitely one of those moments where Cassie does what she does best and her emotions get the better of her and she loses it.
I do want to say, though, that I do think Cassie and Nate were really good friends. Were they the best husband and wife? Probably not. But at the end of the day, they really did care for each other.
As a fan of the show, I was gratified to see that Cassie and Maddy (Alexa Demie) made a conditional sort of peace over the course of the season. Were you rooting for that?
Of course! Because Cassie needs her Maddy and Maddy needs her Cassie. That is the most real version of love that Cassie has in her life.
They’re kind of matter and antimatter — they both need the energy they get from butting up against each other.
For sure. Every blonde needs their brunette.
Eddy Chen
This plot detail was siloed off from your storyline, but I’m curious how you felt when you learned that Zendaya’s character, Rue, was going to die in the finale.
We didn’t get all the scripts. We were only given our specific scenes. We all knew that Rue was going to get killed off — we knew that for a long, long time — but no idea how, when it was going to happen. So when I was watching it with everybody else, it was actually the first time that I even uncovered what was going to happen. It’s crazy, but it was also really neat being able to watch as a viewer and not know what was going to happen. I was crying.
How has “Euphoria” changed your standards about what other parts you take on? Do you get offered parts that are like Cassie, but less interesting?
I fought so hard against playing roles like Cassie — because, as everyone knows, everyone online is like, Oh, she is Cassie, she’s typecast, that’s all she does. If anyone actually looks at what I’ve done between seasons of “Euphoria,” I’ve done “Reality,” “Christy,” “The Housemaid,” “Eden,” “Anyone But You,” such drastically different genres and characters that have no similarity to Cassie. With Season 3, as I was filming it, I remember turning to Kaylee [McGregor], my producing partner, and I was like, We’ve got to find more crazy characters.
It’s not fun doing my job unless I’m challenged. It’s always a little exciting when you’re scared to go into a scene. I want to find more characters like that. Do I want to find Cassie specifically? No, but I want to find a character that pushes me into crazy levels, and to discover different elements of my craft.
It sounds like with your new production company, you could be well-situated to find characters like that.
You might just have to wait and see.
Do you feel satisfied with where Cassie ended up?
I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied with where Cassie ended up, just because I know there is more to tell of Cassie’s story. But I feel that way about so many of my projects. “Everything Sucks!” was a one-season show that I did when I was 18 years old, and sometimes I wake up and go, I wonder if we could all come back. I don’t think that feeling will ever go away. I’ll always be wondering what Cassie is up to in “Euphoria”-verse.
To get specific about the ending: Cassie puts on a brave face for her sister Lexi (Maude Apatow), but after Lexi leaves, Cassie looks up at a picture of herself and Nate together, and sheds a tear. What did you make of that?
She’s trapped in her own dollhouse. She got everything she seemingly wanted, but she’s back at the same place she started. And Lexi left her there.
As a producer, what did you learn from the way Sam runs “Euphoria”?
From a story element, I always want to be telling the truth, but pushing the boundaries. Sam always found this really interesting line of being very truthful of what is going on behind closed doors in a generation, but then also pushing the boundaries on how people are used to perceiving or digesting certain topics. I hope that I can find characters that make people uncomfortable or question their stance, because that’s what art’s supposed to do.
Was it uncomfortable, though, as an actor, to be the object of scrutiny? You were pushing boundaries, but from Cassie’s storyline to your nude scenes, you received real criticism from the show’s skeptics.
I don’t know if I vocabularize this well, but I’ve always found it really interesting how people scrutinize how Cassie was treated on the show, and then they do it to me in real life. There’s no awareness that [Cassie’s peers] sexualize Cassie on the show, but we’re going to do this in real life too. To be honest, sometimes it’s hard, but I hope maybe years from now, when people are separated from the craziness and the clickbait of social media, someone who sits back and watch it all, doing a deep dive, goes, “Huh, maybe we all had this very wrong.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
