Zendaya in 'Euphoria' season three.

Patrick Wymore/HBO

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[This article contains spoilers from the Euphoria season three premiere.]

Originally, Rue was going to cross the border by river. Following the four-year gap from his season two finale, writer-director Sam Levinson knew Euphoria would return with his oft-addled protagonist (portrayed by Zendaya) in Mexico, having made the jump from teenager to adult, still working off the debts incurred during the recklessness of high school. The story had her going back and forth on dangerous drug runs for the unlikely kingpin Laurie (Martha Kelly). But when Levinson started doing research for how he’d introduce this new world, he changed course.

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“We went to the DEA headquarters in Los Angeles and they’ve got a bunch of photos of drug busts that they’ve done — kilos of cocaine, money, all this — and suddenly I see this one photo of a Jeep stuck on top of a border wall,” Levinson says. “I said to the head, ‘Well, what happened here?’ And he said, ‘Some idiot tried to drive a car over the border loaded with drugs, and it got stuck.’ I thought: That sounds like something Rue would do.”

So Euphoria season three begins, with Rue behind the wheel, stuck in midair between two countries. The setpiece introduces the HBO drama’s new ambitions in several ways. In its wider aspect ratio and expansive vista caught on 65mm, Levinson and his longtime D.P. Marcell Rév reset Euphoria’s visual palette. And in the combined comedy and tension of the scene, the show establishes its tricky tonal balance going forward.

“That scene is like Jurassic Park meets Buster Keaton,” Rév says. Levinson adds that Keaton inspired the season as much as classic western filmmakers like Howard Hawks and Sergio Leone.

Marcell Rév and Sam Levinson behind the scenes of Euphoria.

Eddy Chen / HBO

“We have a motto of: Evolve or die,” Levinson says of how he and his crew approach each season of Euphoria. With the massive time-jump this go-round, Levinson and Rév knew that the cinematography would need to reflect that kind of dangerous maturity. “We wanted to make sure we were changing things up. We wanted to give it a feeling of a memory that was fading away — a bit rougher,” Levinson says. “We’re seeing them out in the world, in the wider world, and allowing the actors to communicate emotionally through the performance, as opposed to in the past, when we did it moreso through camera. We wanted to see them fending for themselves.”

Zendaya in Season 3 of HBO’s Euphoria.

HBO

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Before the Hollywood strikes of 2023, Levinson had the bulk of a third season of Euphoria scripted — which was ultimately, largely scrapped. There were several reasons for the change, but he says the most profound one was the death of castmember Angus Cloud, who played Fezco, from an accidental overdose. Levinson was close to Cloud and wanted to honor his memory as best he could in the show, since he was meant to play a large role in season three. This meant keeping his character alive, if of course offscreen, and confronting larger questions of life and death.

The end of the first episode, for instance, finds Rue making a dropoff at a party hosted by rival kingpin Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), only for things to go terrifyingly awry when it’s clear the drugs have been laced. “She send you to sabotage my shit?” Alamo asks Rue of Laurie. She shakes her head nervously, the stakes of the episode raising exponentially, but the moment isn’t placed there just for the mood shift. “I was really angry about fentanyl, the fact that in 2023, the year Angus died, 73,000 Americans died of fentanyl overdoses,” Levinson says. “I couldn’t understand what it was about our country that we were allowing so many people to be poisoned.”

Another key development: Levinson and Rév made an entirely different show between seasons of Euphoria in The Idol, which was ultimately canceled by HBO following poor ratings and reviews for the embattled first season. The pair say their time on that music-driven series informed Euphoria season three.

“The way that I saw [The Idol] was almost like I was filming a reality TV show at times — so it would be three cameras, minimal lighting. It was almost documentary style,” Levinson says. “Anytime you do something, whatever you’re doing next, you kind of want to do the opposite…and there’s a certain objectivity that this season [of Euphoria] has that we discovered, that is really e

Euphoria Season 3 Premiere: How Sam Levinson Brought Back Zendaya's Rue