‘Euphoria' Showrunner Reveals How He Pitched the Ending to Zendaya
Euphoria creator Sam Levinson admits pitching Rue's tragic death in the season three finale to Zendaya wasn't easy.
The writer-director admitted to Variety's Half Hour With series that he had an "emotional reaction" to telling Zendaya that her character wouldn't survive the HBO show. "We love the character Rue. [Zendaya] has done such an incredible job bringing this character to life … in the hands of a lesser actor, the character wouldn't be as charming and lovable and humorous."
In the last ever episode of the controversial series, Zendaya's character, Rue Bennett, overdosed on painkillers laced with Fentanyl. Her friend and sponsor, Ali (played by Colman Domingo), finds her dead on his sofa and sets out to avenge her death. The decision to kill off one of the original characters was a "tough" one, according to Levinson.
He added, "Even through shooting, it sort of weighed on both of us. At the end of the day, she understood what I was doing, and it felt like the right way to honor Angus, someone whom we loved dearly and really rooted for and saw the best in."
Sam Levinson, who himself struggled with addiction, had previously spoken up about how Rue's character arc was inspired by the late Angus Cloud. The actor played Fezco in the first two series of Euphoria but passed away in July 2023, aged just 25.
"When when it came time to shoot the scene [where Rue is found dead], we also had Colman Domingo there, who's been one of my closest collaborators for over a decade and a grounding force in Zendaya's life as well," Levinson explained. "That kind of camaraderie really helped this sequence feel authentic and meaningful. We've been doing this for eight [or] nine years together, so it was a beautiful couple of days as we were shooting those scenes, because we knew how audiences would respond to it."
The showrunner had also previously revealed the original script for Euphoria had a different ending but was rewritten after the passing of Angus Cloud. In an interview with The New York Times's Popcast, Sam explained that he had always been "concerned about the prevalence of fentanyl," but after Angus' passing, he had to rewrite the script, and I thought, you can't tell a story about addiction today without the very real consequences. Most people don't get a second chance."
The start of season three of Euphoria was also initially different. Instead of Rue trying to get into America via the US border, she was supposed to be swimming across the Rio Grande. "I had written that, but early on, we did a scout at the Drug Enforcement Administration offices in Los Angeles, and they have all these photos on the walls of their best drug busts. … I saw this one photo of a Jeep stuck on top of a border wall," he explained.
What Sam Levinson explained what the photo was: "The DEA guy says, ‘Oh, you know, some moron tried to drive a car over the border,' and I thought, ‘That's the kind of moronic thing Rue would do.' And so we ended up recreating it," he told Variety.
Related: Sydney Sweeney Reveals True Thoughts on Controversial ‘Euphoria' Plot
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This story was originally published June 13, 2026 at 1:29 PM.