The latest episode of HBO’s Euphoria had us all reeling when one of its most beloved characters and actors met a grisly end.
Season 3 of the drama has ramped up the ante for its characters, with our favorites now involved in criminal gangs and drug cartels. Nate Jacobs, played by Oscar-nominated Jacob Elordi, has gotten himself in trouble this series after getting into debt with the wrong people.
Spoiler Alert! In the penultimate episode of this third series, the man Nate had accumulated debts with, Naz, dug a grave and buried Nate alive. While they left him a pipe to the surface to help him breathe and prolong his suffering, unfortunately, a rattlesnake crawled down it and killed him.
It’s a nasty death for the character, for whom audiences had been slowly feeling empathy in this series. But Sam had always intended to play with the audience’s emotions by giving Nate a redemption arc before killing him.
“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? 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?'” he told Esquire.
Sam explained why he chose to kill off this leading character, who wed Cassie in a chaotic wedding that ended with him losing his toe. “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?'”
Although Nate’s death was always going to happen, Sam originally planned to have the character to die of suffocation or heat. But then, the writer/director thought about the season’s Western influence, which inspired the use of the rattlesnake.
The showrunner also explained how they created those horrifying finale moments of the seventh episode. He revealed that they used a real venomous rattlesnake for some shots, but did use a non-venomous substitute to film with Elordi in the coffin.
Jacob Elordi agreed with his character’s end. “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.
Euphoria concludes its third season next week on HBO.
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