This story contains spoilers for season 3, episode 7 of Euphoria.
Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes …? If you felt your skin crawling, your stomach turning, and your eyes looking away during the final moments of tonight’s Euphoria episode, you already have the answer to that question.
Sam Levinson, the creator behind TV’s most provocative show, says extreme discomfort was the point. Between having a finger and and toe cut off, being buried alive, and then thrashing inside his coffin with a venomous rattler, the demise of Jacob Elordi’s Nate Jacobs compounded phobia upon phobia. The outspoken fans/haters of Euphoria have long wanted the selfish, controlling, and abusive Nate to get what’s coming to him. Well… be careful what you wish for, people.
“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 tells Esquire in an exclusive breakdown of the season’s penultimate episode. “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?”
The episode has just dropped, so reactions are still rolling in, but it’s a safe bet that Levinson’s emotional button-pushing has worked. It always does. The Euphoria creator and his show’s most addicted viewers have a relationship built on mutual antagonism. They love it. So does he.
Levinson says he knew from the get-go that Nate was finished this season, and after all the grief Elordi’s character unleashed over the years with his own domineering toxicity, there was no question that it would be a bad end. The fans largely saw Nate as deplorable and irredeemable, prone to anger and violence, but throughout this season Levinson muddied the moral waters by repeatedly highlighting flashes of his humanity. It was all a setup for the grim suffering that unfolded onscreen tonight.
“It’s like, ‘Oh, you wanted him to get his comeuppance…? Okay,” Levinson says with a laugh. “That feeling of complicity with the audience is always an interesting note to play inside of this sort of larger structure. 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.”
Anthony Breznican
In the editing bay as Julio C. Perez IV and Sam Levinson work on the season finale of Euphoria.
Esquire’s exclusive preview of episode 7 occurred several weeks ago as Levinson was applying the finishing touches in a sound mixing stage on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. The work took place late in the day on a Friday after Levinson finished adding a particularly heavy scene to the episode 8, the season finale. (More on that next week.)
This all happened just five days after the premiere of episode 1. Euphoria’s editing suite is in an office in a building across the street from the Warner Bros. lot’s Steven J. Ross Theater, which is fronted with an old-school movie palace marquee that turned up as the site of the glitzy Hollywood premiere in the season debut.
Sam Levinson is joined by his wife and producing partner, Ashley Levinson, and a burly gentleman with a wooly beard, spectacles, and long dark hair pulled up into a tight bun, whom they introduce as their “metalhead” secret weapon—editor Julio C. Perez IV (It Follows and The Myth of the American Sleepover).
He’s wearing a Mastodon t-shirt, and when asked for his other metal bona fides, he rattles off Nuclear Assault, Testament, Exodus, Slayer, and the first five albums by Metallica. This turns out not to be just small-talk but a window into his editing style. “The overall through line is I’ve always been really interested in the fringes of the mainstream,” he says. “Things that have a certain dangerous quality that might be mythic. It might be imagined. It might be very real. I’m less interested in corporate sterility and more interested in subculture that’s rather obscure, something with real vitality, something that spits fire, has a wild spirit.”
What better partner for Levinson as they craft the endless incitements of Euphoria. They have been working together for more than eight years. “We met on a recut of Assassination Nation, which was a film I made in 2018. We just got along really well, and worked really well,” Levinson says.
“Sam and I had an immediate rapport,” Perez says. “Right away, it was obvious we had a similar foundation of loving, loving movies. You’d be surprised in this town how many people operate with different priorities. Maybe you’re not surprised at all.”
Ashley Levinson
Sam Levinson, Esquire reporter Anthony Breznican, and Ashley Levinson pedal through the streets of the Warner Bros. lot.
After their work on episode 8 scene is complete, the Levinsons hop on bicycles and we ride through the otherwise empty Warner Bros. backlot at sunset, destined for the sound mixing stage at the other end of the historic moviemaking factory. To our left is the small town square, used for Gilmore Girls and The Dukes of Hazzard, among countless other shows and movies.
To our right, the urban streets that frequently double for New York or other metropolises. Behind the streets are the rows of soundstages, where the flaming-handshake cover of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were here was photographed. Speaking of music, we take a shortcut down an alleyway set, which Ashley points out was the setting for Prince’s Purple Rain album cover.
The Levinsons are deeply enmeshed in the creative history of Los Angeles. Sam is the son of Oscar-winning director Barry Levinson, and while Hollywood has been in a panic over the declining number of shows and movies that have filmed here in recent years, he made sure that Euphoria shot nearly all of season 3 here in his hometown. Now, he, Ashley, and Perez are still local as they put the finishing touches on it.
As outlandish and darkly comedic as Euphoria can be, the way they talk about the precision cuts and sound choices underscore the earnestness and emotion of the scenes. Euphoria is a carnival of chaos, depravity and bad life-choices, but there is also a depth of heart. None of it would matter if viewers didn’t care deep down about what happens to Zendaya’s Rue, Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie, and Hunter Schafer’s Jules.
Faith itself was a theme the show sought to explore this time around, which is how Rue came to delve into her Bible and experience pseudo-religious visions. “I would say it’s a very religious season, which feels like the most radical thing you could do in 2026,” says Ashley.
“I thought if I’ve got an audience that’s paying attention and sort of captivated by it, I want to tell a story about God and family and America and the importance of believing in something greater than yourself,” Sam adds, “which I think is the kind of antidote to the narcissism of social media and technology.”
There are a lot of things stripping away our humanity. Euphoria is about trying to hang on to it despite all that.
Which brings us to Nate, who perhaps fell short more than most. He was aggressive, self-obsessed and destructive. His obsession with money put him in the predicament of owing some even worse people (e.g. Jack Topalian’s Naz) more than he could hope to repay.
He judged Cassie for her OnlyFans work, but his concern about morality, status, and decorum evaporated pretty quickly when his own bills came due. As the lights darken in the mixing stage, episode 7 begins unfold on the big screen, and Sam sits in between his wife and Perez, making notes from the video timestamps about final adjustments to the audio.
Anthony Breznican
Perez and the Levinsons watching episode 7 to make audio adjustments to the final soundscape.
When Nate’s doombringer slithers onscreen, Levinson turns on his swivel chair with a devilish smile. “Those are all real rattlesnakes,” he says. After it descends into Nate’s air pipe, the serpent you see coiling around Elordi in the cross-section scenes of him in the coffin was a non-venomous lookalike.
The final showdown is a nighttime shootout that plays into Levinson’s Old West vibe for this season. “It was what was exciting about the characters being out of high school,” Sam explains. “They’re in the real world and the consequences are real. There’s no safety net. 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.”
He began the writing process by revisiting the classic Westerns from Sergio Leoni, Howard Hawks, John Ford and Don Siegel. “I started playing around with what does a modern Western look like today?” Sam says. “ And how can I inject some of those themes and ideas into it about individuals, ambition, lawlessness.”
When Nate is finally exhumed by backhoe, the jump scare of Elordi’s already-decaying corpse, combined with Cassie’s shrieking despair, pushes Euphoria out of the Western genre and into the realm of outright horror. His once-handsome face sags lifelessly, bloated by poison—which is maybe befitting of someone who brought such venom and toxicity to those around him.
As the lights come up, everyone on the assembled Euphoria team seems eager to gauge an outsider’s reaction. But the prevailing feeling is shock. Only later, when the full Edgar Allan Poe of it all sinks in, does the intense anguish with Nate Jacobs’s lonely and gruesome end fully hit home.
There are moments of levity, for sure. Most of Perez and Levinson’s notes are about adjustments of volume, raising or lowering the sound of dogs barking, the pops and hisses of the bonfire, and the rattle of keys as Rue attempts her escape. Other times, the notes get very specific, as when Colman Domingo’s character is seen inhaling from a crack pipe. It’s too bubbly, Levinson tells the team. “This sounds like a bong because it sounds like there’s water,” he says. “I think we’ve got to take it out. It’s got to just be pure fire.”
HBO Max
What’s next for Cassie after the death of Nate?
One thing that triggers major laughs from the sound team is the sequence in which Cassie is fulfilling her OnlyFans duties, rating the penises of admirers who have paid top dollar for her scorn or praise. She speaks directly to one such man, calling him “Sammy …” That was a prank on Levinson.
Season 3 of Euphoria enlisted Oscar-nominated Juno and Up in the Air filmmaker Jason Reitman as a second unit director, who helped out by shooting cutaway shots like Sweeney looking at the photograph. “So the cut to that dick pick, he told her to say my name, which with the amount of heat I get, just generally speaking, I think we ought to change it.”
He doesn’t want people thinking he put that in there. “Let’s make it Timmy, or Sandy,” Levinson says, which Sweeney can rerecord during her next dubbing session.
“Want her to say Jason?” Perez suggests.
“All right—Jason,” Levinson says, swiveling with glee in his chair. “Let’s go with Jason!” There’s a lesson here: Never start a prank war with someone who has final cut.
But—the joke ends up being on Levinson after all. Just days before the episode drops, he tells Esquire that scheduling complexities didn’t allow him to rerecord the line with Sweeney. (“I left it because she was on set shooting, so I couldn’t ADR it in time,” Levinson says. “Yeah, Jason won.”)
There is a lot of talk with the sound editors about the snake scenes, and how much rattle to add to the final mix. Levinson wants more when the snake first appears, and also thinks the sound will help punctuate the horror of the final shot when Nate’s body is exhumed. “We’re also going to try to get it to rattle on the coffin too at the end,” he says.
HBO Max
Say goodbye to Jacob Elordi’s Nate Jacobs.
Once again, the visuals were often an actual living rattler. Levinson recalled the ominous warning he got from the animal wranglers as they were creating these scenes in the desert on the far outskirts of Los Angeles County. “When we were shooting with the rattlesnakes out in Lancaster, they said, ‘If you get bitten by a rattlesnake, you have about an hour before you die. And unfortunately, the nearest hospital’s an hour and a half away,’” Levinson says. “‘So … don’t get bitten by our rattlesnake.’”
After the mixing session, Sam reveals that his original idea was just to have Nate die from suffocation or heat while buried alive. The horror would have come from the fact that Cassie’s mad scramble to save him was doomed to fail from the beginning.
He intended it as a tribute to a 1973 grindhouse movie about a kidnapping gone awry. “I always loved the movie The Candy Snatchers where the girl gets buried alive with a pipe as an air hole. So I had imagined that Nate would get buried alive,” he says.
The snake came to him one day while he and his wife were driving to work. “It was one of those gorgeous L.A. days where it was perfect weather. We’re listening to Otis Redding. The windows are down and we’re driving to Warner Brothers and I’m looking out the window,” he recalls. “I just had this image of a rattlesnake coming towards this pipe. He’s banging and the snake can sense the movement in the ground. And I thought, What if the snake goes into the pipe and then he’s stuck inside the coffin with this rattlesnake?”
“It’s sort of a funny moment where you realize that not all dark scenes come from a dark place,” he adds. “I turned to Ash and I said, ‘I think I got it.’ And I explained how Nate dies in this sequence. She goes, ‘That’s what you’ve been thinking about?’”
With the season finale on the way next week, Levinson has this word of warning for fans: “When episode 8 airs, if you’re not watching it live, it’s going to get spoiled for you.”
