‘Euphoria’ Creator Sam Levinson Explains That Shocking Death

Fans of “Euphoria” were shocked to discover in Sunday’s episode that a longtime character from the series finally met their demise. To make matters even more gut-churning, the death was downright gruesome. The fact that the character was semi-hated made their goodbye even more conflicting for fans of the show, which was entirely by design. Indeed, creator Sam Levinson was planning that death from the early stages of Season 3.

Here’s your final spoiler warning for “Euphoria” Season 3 Episode 7.

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So yes, Jacob Elordi’s Nate is the latest victim in the HBO series, meeting his end in the penultimate episode of the season.

Buried underground by Naz (Jack Topalian), Nate’s time was running out as the loan sharks gave Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) a deadline of three days to pay back the money Nate owed them, or else Nate would be dead.

Nate had a small hole in his coffin for air, so after Cassie enlisted some help to deal with the loan sharks, it looked as though she’d saved her beau. But when opening the coffin, they discovered that Nate was already dead. A rattlesnake had slithered through the air hole and killed Nate with a venomous bite.

According to Levinson, the death of Nate was planned from the beginning.

“There’s this kind of funny thing where I know what the audience wants in terms of justice or karma and with that in mind, I always think, ‘Well, how can I give it to them?” Levinson told Esquire. “How can I give them what they want, but make it so horrific and anxiety-inducing that by the time it happens, the audience isn’t so sure they wanted it?”

Indeed, Levinson wanted to play with the audience’s emotions by offering tiny slivers of empathy for Nate throughout the season, making his death all the more complicated.

“It’s like, ‘Oh, you wanted him to get his comeuppance…? Okay,” Levinson said. “That feeling of complicity with the audience is always an interesting note to play inside of this sort of larger structure. You end up going, ‘Oh God, I don’t know. Should he have had it better? Did he deserve it?’ Those kinds of questions are always exciting to pose to the audience.”

But the exact circumstances of Nate’s death didn’t come to Levinson immediately. Originally, he was going to have the character die of suffocation or heat, until he happened upon the idea of the rattlesnake — a nod to the season’s Western influence.

And yes, they used a real snake for the sequence, although a rattlesnake was too dangerous so a boa constrictor was put in the coffin with Elordi.

As for Elordi’s reaction to Nate’s death, it seems like the Oscar-nominated “Frankenstein” actor understood it.

“Nate is someone who’s made so many mistakes and made so many dark choices. It’s cool to see it all come to what it’s come to,” he said in a post-show interview for HBO.

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