Spoilers for the Euphoria season-two finale, “All My Life, My Heart Has Yearned for a Thing I Cannot Name,” below.
Sam Levinson has broken his media silence on Euphoria season 2 to explain that he’s quirky. “My writing process is pretty bizarre,” Levinson said at a FYC panel Wednesday night at Los Angeles’ Academy Museum. “I write hundreds of drafts and I don’t go back and rewrite. I start from my memory of the last draft.” That would explain why certain plot points fall by the wayside. They don’t stick in Levinson’s craw. He explained that season 2’s arc hinged on the powerhouse episode 5 “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.” Levinson wrote a first run of season 2 and discarded everything but episode 5. “The first version of season two changed but I love this episode,” he said. “I feel like I saw it as a fulcrum of the season, that everything that came before it — the hedonism, the nihilism, the immaturity of the first few episodes — just falls by the wayside.”
At the same panel, Zendaya echoed Levinson’s words, saying Rue’s original trajectory was much darker. “We were, like, there needs to be a new ending to this show,” she said. “We flipped it around and make it much more positive and beautiful because, I think, that is my greatest hope for her and that is my greatest hope for anyone watching that has a loved one like Rue.” Plot points seem to change a lot on set on Euphoria. Javon Walton, who plays Ashtray, said that Fez was originally slated to die in the season 2 finale, not Ash. “Before we even filmed that whole craziness, Fez was supposed to die and then they switched it to me dying,” he told Vulture. “It was on the spot, the writing, like a day before. It was craziness.”
