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[This story contains major spoilers from Euphoria‘s season three finale.]
Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje’s death, in the climactic final scenes of Euphoria, was not supposed to happen the way it did. In the first iterations of the script, his character, the strip club empresario and season three Big Bad Alamo Brown, went out while he was on top of the world — he’d just toppled drug kingpin Laurie (played by Martha Kelly), defeated the DEA, and was in the midst of celebrating taking out another of one his adversaries (Zendaya’s Rue; more on that later) when his final moment came. But then Akinnuoye-Agbaje and creator Sam Levinson got to talking, and they realized the moment needed something more poignant.
“We asked ourselves, was his journey really just about chasing money and women?” says Akinnuoye-Agbaje. “We thought it would be more substantive to have a reflective moment where he realizes he has everything, and yet nothing. He should be thinking, ‘Is this really what it’s all about?’”
Levinson then wrote the scene that audiences saw on Sunday night: Alamo watching everyone celebrating at the strip club, feeling too sick to eat his steak, and then professing his desire to find love and start a family. It was a far cry from the ruthlessness that dominated the season, but Akinnuoye-Agbaje is pleased with the reflective arc. “When we meet my character at the beginning, he’s professing to be the king of pussy, and he thinks he’s pimped the game of exploiting women,” he says. “But by the end, he’s realized he wants to surrender to the power of women.”
