Euphoria Season 3 has ruined Sydney Sweeney’s character Cassie in humiliating ways.
Before I had ever watched a minute of HBO’s teen drama Euphoria, I had already seen the bare breasts of Cassie Howard, played by Sydney Sweeney. In the GIF I glimpsed, shared online, she was in the bathroom at a high school party, making out with Jacob Elordi’s character Nate, the longtime on-again, off-again boyfriend of Cassie’s best friend. Plenty such GIFs exist on the internet—there are many horny users devoted to capturing, for posterity’s sake, any scene with topless Cassie—but in this specific context, the poster was deploying it to advance an argument that Sweeney was, counter to her apparently MAGA fan base’s beliefs, far from a heartland sweetheart on the brink of ending wokeness forever. She was, instead, they suggested, just an actress who would take a part requiring that she show chest early and often, while playing a character who was a dirty cheat.
That may have been the impression that Cassie left many viewers with by the end of Euphoria’s second season, but she wasn’t always like this. When I finally watched the show, in the lead-up to the long-awaited release of its third season this April, I felt a bit defensive on her behalf. It may be difficult to remember, considering the number of years that have passed in between seasons, but back then, there was a pathos to Cassie that justified all the humiliating storylines thrown at her, and even her many nude scenes. No longer. Now, in Season 3, Cassie has lost everything that made her even a little bit interesting. Those omnipresent GIFs—yes, more of them!—of current-day Cassie dressed as a sexy little puppy are not, as a Cassie defender might still hope, obscuring some more interesting or subversive ideas about her character (at least, not in the three episodes that critics were able to screen). Finally, after all these years, those Sweeney haters who think her part on Euphoria is a useless humiliation ritual have been vindicated: Euphoria’s most pitiful character has become the worst possible version of herself.
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Euphoria’s first two seasons were about high schoolers wrecking themselves on the rocks of life, largely unencumbered by parental guidance. It made sense for creator Sam Levinson to include a character like Cassie, a girl cursed with a handsome, absent addict of a father, who’s been told since she was in puberty that she has the best face and body in school. (Parents of girls often wonder whether it is a bad thing to tell your daughter she’s beautiful. Cassie is proof it probably pays to be careful.) In Season 1, you feel for Cassie as she tries to keep a relationship going with McKay (Algee Smith), a boyfriend who’s gone off to college and is distracted by his new life. He won’t claim her in public, and he talks constantly about football. She reacts by taking ecstasy at a carnival, making out with another guy, and having a very public orgasm while riding a carousel (ah, Euphoria), all of which only creates more problems. At the end of the season, after she terminates a pregnancy, her sadness about breaking up with McKay feels overwhelming.
In Season 2, which opens with that infamous bathroom moment, Cassie, uncomfortably single, swoons into a dalliance with Nate, who has long been involved with her best friend Maddy (Alexa Demie). Although he, a sadistic jock with high standards, doesn’t seem like someone who’d brook a fool like Cassie, he can see the advantage of being with a woman who would do anything to keep him. “Pretty girl with daddy issues” is hardly a groundbreaking archetype, but something about Cassie made it hard to look away, especially in Season 2. She’s liquid without a bottle—constantly in tears, drinking too much, and throwing up in the hot tub. A memorable montage follows Cassie setting her alarm for 4 a.m., shaving her legs, donning beautifying masks, using rollers on various body parts, and painting on her makeup, as she prepares for school during a period when she and Nate are on a break. ”Even if Nate pretended not to notice her, it was her way of telling him she was his,” Zendaya’s character Rue says in voice-over. In this phase of her life, Cassie’s volatility gives Sweeney scope as an actress. Cassie’s mother, Suze (Alanna Ubach), a wine mom in a bad way, can’t get on board with her affair with Nate, confronting her about the “principle” of “not fucking your best friend’s boyfriend.” Sweeney ugly-screams: “That is what I”m trying to tell you, Mom! They weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend, god!” (“I just want to watch my Millionaire Matchmaker in peace,” her mom replies.)
But in Season 3, after the show’s five-year time jump, the spectacle of Cassie’s former messiness has resolved itself into a dry, boring caricature of money-hungry self-obsession. She and Nate are still together, and living in an unrenovated palace of a house in their hometown, while the rest of the characters have scattered to cities, doing the things twentysomethings do. Cassie used to prostrate herself for love; now, she’s motivated by money. She wants a fancier wedding than Nate can provide—specificially, a wedding with $50,000 worth of flowers. “I didn’t wait my entire life to have a ghetto wedding,” is how she puts it, in a way crueler formulation than Season 1 or Season 2’s Cassie would have ever used.
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What’s Happening to Sydney Sweeney’s Character on Euphoria Feels Like a Humiliation Ritual
Cassie turns to the idea of earning money on OnlyFans after flirting with posting risqué content of herself on TikTok. Maybe she does so because, as Rue says in voice-over, she’s “so desperate for attention she’s willing to humiliate herself.” Maybe the puppyplay photos—and the other pics and videos that Juana (Minerva García), their housekeeper, helps her take, including one deeply awful one of Cassie holding her feet in happy baby pose and sucking on a pacifier—can be explained by Cassie being a former high school hottie whose distracted husband isn’t providing what she wants. But these new humiliations feel distant, provoking no sympathy at all from viewers already repelled by Sweeney’s public persona, still reeling from the slap of that “ghetto.”
But the most embarrassing Cassie scene in Season 3’s newly aired second episode is the one in which Cassie and her former BFF Maddy, who now manages talent including actors and influencers, have poolside drinks after years of no contact. This interaction shows Cassie at her least interesting: silly, grasping, ambitious but incapable. Cassie humiliates herself, and she has no idea. “I just feel like if more people knew me, I would be huge,” she says to Maddy, who not-very-gently breaks the news: “The market’s just oversaturated with a lot of girls like you.” Maddy tells Cassie she doesn’t know the right people, and has no taste; in Maddy’s professional opinion, her content looks desperate. It “tries too hard, instead of just being.”
“Being what?” Cassie asks, to which Maddy replies: “Yourself.”
“Who am I?” Cassie asks.
“That’s a really good question,” Maddy replies.
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Once upon a time, in the far-off world that was Euphoria’s first two seasons, Cassie was somebody’s daughter, somebody’s friend. You could even squint and see that she believed she actually loved Nate, even if that was a dangerous delusion. The vulnerable qualities Sweeney brought to the role gave you the feeling that this girl was intensely needy. For a star sometimes accused of doing too much for attention, who was at the time right at the precipice of fame, that old Cassie made perfect sense. Now, Sydney Sweeney is a household name and a political lighting rod, and the character she became famous for has become inhumanly awful, with no relationship to anyone at all, except herself. “I honestly can’t tell whether Levinson is obsessed with Cassie or hates her—probably both,” wrote a fan on Reddit about this new season. Before Season 3 started, I would have picked the first option. Now, I’m not so sure.
