HBO
The most explicit scenes in Euphoria Season 3 almost didn’t happen — and it was Sydney Sweeney who pushed back to make sure they did. According to Sam Levinson, Sweeney asked him if he was “kidding” when he suggested not depicting some of her raunchiest S3 scenes.
In a new interview with the New York Times that was published after Sunday night’s series finale, Euphoria creator Sam Levinson revealed that he initially considered shooting around the skin-baring scenes in Season 3, despite Cassie’s storyline centering on her career as an adult content creator.
According to Levinson, however, Sydney Sweeney was staunchly against the idea.
Sydney Sweeney pushed back on Euphoria creator Sam Levinson’s idea to “shoot around” some of her most explicit scenes in Season 3
“Well, it’s funny. When I first wrote it, I was like, ‘Maybe we shoot all of this and we don’t have any n—–. Maybe there’s ways to shoot around certain things?’ And [Sydney] looked at me and she was like, ‘Are you kidding? I’m playing an OnlyFans model. You’re telling me you’re going to, like, skirt around it?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, OK, that’s a fair point,’” creator Sam Levinson told the New York Times.
“From the script, you get a sense of what the role requires,” Levinson added. “Even when you go up to audition, let’s use the role of Cassie, you know the role requires a certain amount of n—–. Are you comfortable? If they’re comfortable, they get the role, then the next layer is the intimacy coordinator. I think it’s a SAG rule that if an actor then says, after getting cast, ‘Actually, I don’t want to do that,’ we can’t force them to do a scene.”
In her career thus far, Sweeney has proven she’s anything but shy when it comes to stripping down on-camera, having rocked her birthday suit, to varying degrees, in Euphoria, The Voyeurs, The Housemaid, Eden, and Anyone But You.