Cassie Howard’s story has concluded. But Sydney Sweeney isn’t quite ready to let her go.
Sweeney, already an Emmy nominee for the second season of “Euphoria” in 2022, dove even deeper into the character for the recent third and final season, and she tells Variety that she still thinks about what else Cassie might get up to. Over the course of eight episodes, Cassie, whom we’d last seen as a painfully insecure high-schooler, experienced endless milestones of grown-up life — getting married to boyfriend Nate (Jacob Elordi), facing down her household’s bankruptcy and working as an OnlyFans model to pay the bills (and Nate’s debts). Throughout, the show’s trademark surreality and sense of play allowed Sweeney to act out massive emotional swings and to edge into the absurd, as in a sequence where Cassie strides through Los Angeles, towering over buildings and dominating the men below.
Cassie has been a calling-card role for Sweeney, who had never played a part this meaty when the show launched in 2019. (Last year, Variety declared her turn on “Euphoria” to be one of the greatest TV performances of the century so far.) Since then, Sweeney has scaled up her ambition in acting and producing; never busier, Sweeney could well receive another Emmy nomination this summer. Given the role’s frank sexuality, it’s also sparked yet more of the endless conversation and controversy that seems to trail her. In a conversation while on a break from the Australia set of anime adaptation “Gundam,” Sweeney says that she believes, or hopes, that when separated from the noise of the present moment, “Euphoria” will age well, and that some of her critics might think, as she puts it: “Maybe we all had this very wrong.”
