Euphoria creator explains this shock season 3 death

“How do you give them what they want while making it so horrible and anxiety-inducing?” Sam Levinson has thought of everything!

Warning, spoilers for season 3 of Euphoria

The creator of the series, Sam Levinson, returned to the shock death which concluded the penultimate episode of season 3 of Euphoria, currently broadcast on HBO Max in France.

In this episode, Nate Jacobs, the character played by Jacob Elordi, passes the gun to the left after being buried alive by loan sharks who have been torturing him since the start of the season because of a million dollar debt. Despite the desperate efforts of Cassie, played by Sydney Sweeney, Nate ends up trapped in a coffin… before being bitten by a rattlesnake and dying alone.

A particularly horrible exit for one of the series’ most controversial characters. In an interview with Esquire, Sam Levinson explains that he thought for a long time about how to give the public the justice they wanted after all the atrocities committed by Nate in the first two seasons.

“Can we come up with something quite funny: I know what the audience sees in terms of justice or karma. And from there, I always ask myself: how can I give them that?”

But above all, the showrunner wanted to push the spectators to their limits.

“How do you give them what they want while making it so horrible and anxiety-inducing that by the time it happens, the audience isn’t really sure they want it?”

At the same time, this season 3 changed all the codes of Euphoria, leaving the high school setting to slide towards something much darker, almost a neo-western criminal thriller.

“That’s what was exciting about taking the characters out of high school: They’re now in the real world and the consequences are real. There’s no safety net anymore. I like that Wild West, wild frontier feel, where you can become someone…but you have to live with the consequences.”

Originally, Nate was simply going to die of asphyxiation in his coffin while Cassie tried in vain to find him. But a much more twisted idea finally occurred to Levinson during a car ride with his wife. The idea of the snake:

“It was one of those beautiful days in Los Angeles. The weather was perfect. We were listening to Otis Redding with the windows open on the way to Warner Bros. And then I had this image of a rattlesnake approaching the pipe. Nate is tapping the walls and the snake feels the vibrations in the ground. And I thought, what if the snake went into the pipe and got stuck with him in the coffin?”

Levinson also explains that not all the darkest ideas necessarily come from a dark place.

“It’s a pretty funny moment where you realize that not all dark scenes are born from a dark mind.” And when he told his wife about his idea, her reaction was immediate: “Is that what you were thinking?”

For his part, Jacob Elordi seems to have rather appreciated the fate reserved for Nate.

In a post-episode interview with HBO, the actor described the death as a “cool” way to leave the series.