I recently wrote about the show Euphoria, and highlighted some of the ways that the series has been absolutely insane from the very beginning. Despite my insistence that the HBO show has been bonkers from day one, I can admit that the third and final season has taken things to bizarre places that would feel entirely alien to a day one viewer. This seems to be the case even for series lead Sydney Sweeney, as she stated in a recent interview with Variety. It turns out that no one is pleased with the way Euphoria ended, including the show’s main star. When asked if she felt satisfied with her character’s final moments, Sweeney replied “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 … I don’t think that feeling will ever go away. I’ll always be wondering what Cassie is up to in Euphoria-verse.” In fairness, Sweeney expressed that she has similar sentiments about all of her characters, especially those whom she becomes attached to after playing for years at a time, such as Cassie.
Cassie’s Egregious Evolution
In case you missed it, Cassie has one of the show’s most outrageous plotlines. In the first season of Euphoria, she acts like a typical high school student who occasionally experiments with party drugs and lusts after college men. When compared to Rue’s drug trafficking operation and Jules’ affinity for meeting adult predators over the internet, Cassie’s story seems as mild as something you’d find on daytime TV 20 years ago.
Naturally, by the time the second season of Euphoria debuted, Sydney Sweeney had already begun to exhibit serious star power, which led to her taking on a significantly larger role. That season saw her having multiple emotional breakdowns after shacking up with her best friend’s ex, and fighting with her sister after she becomes the subject of a satirical theater show. By season three, however, Cassie is a married OnlyFans model, who eats out of a dog bowl, grows to Godzilla heights, and pops up on podcasts to drop ableist slurs.
Trapped In Her Own Dollhouse
The character’s final moments involve losing her husband after he’s buried alive and choked out by a snake, making a million dollars to exchange with a cartel boss, and opening a content house with a harem of aspiring nude cam models. This is like a character arc you’d see on 30 Rock as a satirical example of bad TV. By the time Euphoria rolls credits on the final episode, Cassie has undergone basically no growth, no change, and her only accomplishment is that she’s shed enough tears to fill an olympic sized swimming pool.
“She’s trapped in her own dollhouse,” Sydney Sweeney says in an interview with Variety about Cassie’s final scene. She appears to have received everything she desired, but she is back where she started. Sweeney also articulates that she enjoyed playing a character as frenetic and crazy as Cassie, and says that she’d like to “find more characters like that” in the future. It’s possible that we’ll see more of this character outside of the original show now that she runs her own production company. It really only depends on Sweeney’s level of dissatisfaction with Sam Levinson’s writing.
