Levinson had a different ending for Rue, Zendaya’s character in Euphoria, before the death of star Angus Cloud.

Cloud, who played drug dealer Fezco in the first 2 seasons of the buzzy series, died in 2023 at age 25 from a fentanyl-related overdose while Levinson was working on the third — and what would become final — season.

In the season 3 finale, titled “In God We Trust,” Zendaya’s opiate addict Rue Bennett dies from fentanyl-laced Percocet given to her by drug kingpin Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), in a move of sadistic revenge for believing she was working with the DEA. Brown eventually gets what he deserves, when Rue’s sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo) kills him in an epic shootout (another scene that changed from its inception).

With the entire ensemble, Levinsn set out to pull back “the illusions of the world that we live in, whether it’s ‘likes will fulfill your soul,’ whether it’s love, money, fame, drugs will provide an escape,” referring to story arcs for ther core figures, played by Sydney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi, Alexa Demie, Hunter Schafer and Maude Apatow.

“It felt like if we were really going to be saying something, we needed to put the audience in the position of a family member who loses someone that they love. And I know how much I love Rue and audiences love Rue. I wanted to mirror that feeling.”

Euphoria viewers were hit with that feeling while watching Rue’s death scene. At first, viewers were made to believe that Fezco — who Levinson kept alive in the show, and put in prison as a consequence of the season 2 finale–had escaped, and Rue was running out of Ali’s house to go save her friend. But when Rue arrived back at her own house, the sequence of events transformed into a hallucination and was slowly revealed to be her crossing over.

Rue’s death hit harder after a season with her addiction not being front and center. The life-and-death stakes were raised when the former high school series jumped five years to show a now-young adult Rue becoming drug mule and working for rival kingpins (Martha Kelly’s Laurie also took her own life in the finale).

There was a four-year real-time gap between seasons 2 and 3 that prompted the jump, as well as rumors of conflict behind the scenes.

“You can go through different phases of addiction where you’re using every single second of a day to feeling like you kind of have your life together. Maybe you smoke a little weed, you drink, but it’s not the most pressing issue,” Levinson said of Rue’s addiction and death arc in season three. “But that addictive personality is always underneath the surface. And in the end, she’s banged up and her hand got cut. I always thought of it as a window into whatever pain is going on in her psyche. And she feels, ‘OK, I’ll just take one.’ And I always imagine it was the fentanyl that she had smuggled into the country in the first episode of season three.

When speaking about that premiere, Levinson had said, “I was really angry about fentanyl, the fact that in 2023, the year Angus died, 73,000 Americans died of fentanyl overdoses. I couldn’t understand what it was about our country that we were allowing so many people to be poisoned.”

Levinson also dedicated his finale introduction speech to Cloud when speaking to the attendees at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater on Sunday, talking about telling a story about addiction and its consequences and how, when life happens between the work, it shapes the story.

When speaking to Popcast, Levinson defended the sexualization of the series, explained why some of the storylines ended up mirroring real life, and why some characters were minimized.

“From the script, you get a sense of what the role requires. Even when you go up to audition, let’s use the role of Cassie [played by Sweeney], you know the role requires a certain amount of nudity. Are you comfortable? If they’re comfortable, they get the role, then the next layer is the intimacy coordinator. I think it’s Screen Actors Guild rule that if an actor then says, after getting cast, actually, I don’t want to do that, we can’t force them to do a scene. I believe very strongly that the best, most honest performances are when an actor feels free and safe. … So my job is to create the kind of best, most conducive environment for the actor to play this character,” he explained when talking about Sweeney’s OnlyFans storyline.

With Nate, he said “all of the wheeling and dealing that he does is the engine for Cassie’s story, which becomes the bigger arc of the season, as opposed to each episode we’re going to delve into his specific struggles. I think because audiences know the history of these characters, everything is always a little, like — it gets compared to what you know.”

“At what point do you just say something is evil? If you’re selling poison to kids and you’re killing them, it’s evil. What do you do in that situation? How do you confront it? How do you deal with it?” he said of the anger explored through Domingo’s Ali after Rue’s death.

“We live in a pretty fucked up world. It’s what Lexi [Maude’s character] says to Cassie where she read the Bible. She doesn’t really understand it, but she does know people are always dying and you’ve just got to go on. There’s definitely fragility there. But it’s a renewal of sorts. If we can get our shit together and take care of our loved ones and maybe believe in something a little greater than ourselves, then we can carve out a future.”