Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, and the ‘Euphoria’ Cast Break Down Rue’s Heartbreaking Meltdown

HBO‘s Euphoria always puts its characters through the wringer, but Euphoria Season 2 Episode 5 might have been harder on Rue (Zendaya) than ever before. Rue’s nearest and dearest stage an intervention, from which Rue immediately flees. In Rue’s mania, she not only breaks into a stranger’s house looking for drug money, runs on foot from the cops, lands on a cactus, and winds up begging for a fix from dangerous drug dealer Laurie (Martha Kelly). That last choice forces Rue to sneak out of Laurie’s apartment for her life, as it’s been implied that Laurie intended to sell the teenager into sex slavery in exchange for both her morphine fix and stolen drugs.

But according to Euphoria star Zendaya, the hardest part of the episode wasn’t running through LA (or surviving Laurie’s den), but saying those horrible things to the people Rue loves.

“Yeah, the emotional scenes make running through L.A. at 2 A.M seem like nothing. I’d fall into a bed of fake cactuses a million times and it wouldn’t be as painful as having to yell in someone you care about’s face things you don’t mean and words that don’t belong to you,” Zendaya told Decider. “It’s not fun and although you mentally know it’s not real your body doesn’t know it’s not real, and you feel bad for kicking a door down and feeling like I scared someone or hurt someone. You still feel responsible for it even though you know it’s not you.”

Zendaya added that “it’s kind of the same” for Rue, the character. “She knows this isn’t her. We know this isn’t her. She does things and it’s immediately painful that she just did it. She can’t believe she did what she did and it’s difficult to watch her flip in and out of that place. And also kind of scary,” Zendaya said.

Zendaya wasn’t the only actor who found it difficult to do those emotionally charged scenes. Her co-stars did as well. At first, Rue believes only her mother (Nika King) and sister Gia (Storm Reid) are confronting her about her drug abuse. Then she realizes that Jules (Hunter Schafer) and Elliot (Dominic Fike) are there, too. Schafer told Decider that sometimes “the lines get blurred between real pain and performance.”

“I hate watching people that I love hurting or crying. Any of that is fucking painful. So anytime I’ve gotta do a scene with Z where she’s not in the best state of mind or Rue isn’t, it hurts!” Schafer said. “It’s so sad and all you wanna do is — [makes hugging motion with arms] ‘Oh, it’s okay!’ — But, you know, you can’t for obvious reasons. It’s a performance.”

Nika King also shared that it was challenging to find the restraint that Rue’s mother Leslie needed in this trying moment, when she realizes “things just got worse.”

“Not only are we dealing with her being addicted to drugs, as a family we are now going into uncharted territory. We are moving into her possibly putting her life literally on the line with another character that really has no patience when it comes to someone stepping over that line,” King said. “So, for me the challenging part was listening to Rue’s character kind of say these things and really not have a violent reaction. Truly, because some of the things she says are really horrible to say to anyone so, it involved some restraint.”

Zendaya added that as Rue, she had to find the fine line in her performance to show “that you just didn’t know how violent [Rue]was gonna get.”

“She could hit someone. She could hurt someone. She could yell at someone or she could just be quiet and you don’t know when it’s gonna happen. And that volatility is a culmination of all this pain that’s just spewing out onto everyone else, some deserving and some not,” Zendaya said.

Storm Reid pointed out that it was important to show that Rue’s actions weren’t just self-destructive. “I mean, yeah, I think it’s challenging. I think Gia is a perfect reminder that people who are dealing with addiction, it affects not only them but the people around them,” Reid said. “So, I think you really get to see in the first and second season that Gia is strongly affected by the things that Rue is doing, and to see her in this pain and state of confusion is heartbreaking.”

“As an actress it’s painful because I care about her and I don’t want her to ruin her life, I don’t want her to say these things,” Zendaya said, noting that her performance was also so much more than Rue’s pain. “I think Rue is representative of so much more to a lot of people. She is the embodiment of a lot of people’s pasts and a lot of people’s lives and a lot of people’s sobriety journeys. So, it’s not just my own pain that I’m carrying, it’s a lot. It’s the culmination of a lot of people’s.”

So what happens next for Rue? After narrowly surviving sex slavery at Laurie’s hand? Well, we can only hope for the best…

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