Though the past season of Euphoria played host to a number of villains — for instance there’s Custer, a mole for the police working on Fezco’s operation; also Laurie, the kitschy druglord who politely threatened to sell Zendaya’s addict protagonist into slavery — Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) was notably diabolical. Watching him and Cassie’s sex-fuelled car-wreck of a relationship was entirely a matter of waiting for the other shoe to drop — for Alexa Demie’s Maddy to find out that her best friend has indeed fucked her ex, and now she’s crying? Now, it transpires, in a pandemic-less alternate time, the worst couple on TV may never have happened at all.
At least, that’s how Alexa remembers it. At a For Your Consideration event at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, a Variety reporter asked the actor about “the biggest change” she’d encountered in a script for the HBO show. “Well, the whole of season 2!” said Alexa, wearing a sheer and shimmering black gown that will probably be displayed in some sort of A24 museum one day. “We went to a table read, and it was an entirely different thing. Then the pandemic happened, we had a break, came back and it was a whole new season 2. So…” she trails off and shrugs.
“So is Cassie with Nate in the original?” the reporter asks. “I don’t think so! I have a very selective memory, but I don’t think so,” she says. We already tend to err on the side of Cassie apologist — though as i-D’s Róisín Lanigan writes in a defence of Sydney Sweeney’s character, “no more so than I am an apologist for any of the other flawed, broken, ugly characters in the relentless, unforgiving universe that Sam Levinson created for them to live in.” In nearly every episode this season, “Cassie acts out the kind of things you remember at two in the morning and cringe so hard at that it’s impossible to sleep.” So it’s hard not to wonder what Cassie’s storylines might have been like, had Nate Jacobs never darkened her door.
Maybe she would have spent time working on her broken relationship with her sister, and had a more active role in Lexi’s play. Or used the time she spent physically exfoliating her entire face and body each morning (girl, come on) to pick up a quirky new hobby. But, she may also have never been mistaken for an Oklahoma! cast member. That iconic bathroom scene could have played out quite differently. Maybe things worked out for the best.
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