Darrell Britt-Gibson in 'Euphoria.'

Courtesy of HBO

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Now 20 years later, Britt-Gibson is back on an HBO hit, again circling various crime underworlds and again spending a lot of time with some OG fan favorites — in this case, no less than the series protagonist. But Britt-Gibson came in well aware of Euphoria’s magnitude. And portraying Bishop, one of the main henchmen to kingpin Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who has taken in Rue (Zendaya) as his newest recruit, the actor has given viewers far less reason to be angry with him. Unless you were big fans of rival drug lord Laurie, since episode three ends with him killing her prized bird, Paladin, on Alamo’s behalf in an escalating turf-revenge war.

Otherwise, Bishop is one of several mysteries circling the season. “I don’t like to give away other people’s secrets —when people tell me something, it stays with me,” Britt-Gibson says. “This show and everything that we’ve done, it’s like somebody was telling me a gigantic secret, and I’m telling everybody involved, ‘Your secret is safe with me.’” In conversation about the first three episodes of Euphoria’s third season and what’s to come, we tried to pry at least a few.

Darrell Britt-Gibson in ‘Euphoria.’

Patrick Wymore/HBO

How was Bishop pitched to you and what excited you about him?

I had just come off of an intense, whirlwind promotion for the film that I wrote and starred, and She Taught Love. We were fighting so hard for people to see this movie, and for every door that was open three were closed, so I found myself at a moment where I had told the people around me that I just didn’t want to act for a beat. I wanted to just sit down and breathe and just come back to myself a little bit. And then this audition for Euphoria came in…. I look at auditions as practice, like I’m going to go to the gym, putting some shots up, and then letting it be what it is.

I sent in this tape, and then…a couple weeks or a month later, they were like, “Sam loved your tape. He wants to meet.” I’m thinking, “This is actually going further than I thought it was going to go.” We do this Zoom and it’s my first time getting to meet Sam. I was just telling him about how amazing the world that he had created is. It was about, probably — it felt like three months later, and I could be wrong, but it was somewhere in the one to three month range, where they were like, “Hey, so the initial role that you read for, they wanted to age that up, but Sam loves you so much and he wants to craft this character with you.” I was like, really?

So what went into that — how did you craft Bishop with Sam? What ideas did you bring to the table?

He was sort of pitching me who this character was. I remember having ideas about what I thought that this character could be. A lot of times as an actor, if you have thoughts, you’re preparing yourself for the creator to be like, “Well, that’s not how I see it. This is what it should be. This is how we want it to be done, do that.” But every idea that I pitched to Sam, he loved it — every one. He actually believes in the collaboration.

For me it just was sort of like, “What does this character do? How does he function in this world? What’s his purpose in it?” One of the ideas I brought was the beads that I carried, and then it was the stillness with which he operates. And my hair — this is my real hair, and I was like, “I’ve never rea

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