Actors have learned how to saddle up since the advent of Hollywood. But rarely does a job call for riding a horse while furiously swinging a mallet — and charging at Zendaya buried in the dirt up to her neck.
As Alamo Brown, the towering strip club tycoon and self-proclaimed “king of pussy,” Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje had six weeks to train for a 30-second scene, a wince-inducing cliffhanger in which he nearly knocks Rue’s head clean off her body.
“That was some of the best acting I’ve done in the show,” says the Nigerian British actor, chuckling, “because you couldn’t tell I was truly petrified of falling off the horse.”
Akinnuoye-Agbaje is the big bad in Season 3 of “Euphoria,” his screen time nearly matching Zendaya’s. We meet him in the first episode, sandwiched between four women in a hot tub, wearing nothing but a snakeskin Speedo, a gold chain and a cowboy hat. Alamo rescues Rue from her indentured servitude to one drug lord and brings her into his equally dangerous orbit of outlawry.
Eddy Chen
