‘Awards Chatter’: ‘Euphoria’ Creator Sam Levinson on Addiction, “Social Media Mobs,” Nick Reiner and “Going Out on Top”

Sam Levinson, the second-generation writer and director, has been the primary creative force behind some of the most envelope-pushing and polarizing small- and big-screen projects of the past decade, including the films Assassination Nation and Malcolm and Marie and the TV series The Idol and, most famously, Euphoria, the Emmy-winning HBO drama series about the troubles of a group of young people in present-day America, which recently wrapped its third and final season.

The 41-year-old created Euphoria back in 2019; cast as its lead Zendaya, an actress theretofore known for a Disney Channel series and family films; surrounded her with little-known young actors who have since exploded only Hollywood’s A-list alongside her, including Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney; and served as its showrunner for its entire run, while also writing all of its 26 episodes (only one with a collaborator) and directing 23 of them.

Over the course of a conversation at the L.A. offices of The Hollywood Reporter, Levinson candidly reflected on how his own battle with addiction shaped the show; what he made of the fiery discussions and debates about his handling of Euphoria and The Idol, which he followed on social media; how several real-life tragedies shaped the denouement of Euphoria; why he sees today’s society metaphorically — and depicted it literally in Euphoria’s final season — as a wild west, of sorts; plus more.

You can listen to the full conversation via the audio player above or read excerpts of it — lightly edited for clarity and/or brevity — below.

On the roots of his own substance and addiction problems, and how it impacted his own high school experience …

“From a very early age, I’d have extreme anxiety, panic attacks, things of that sort, also obsessive compulsive disorder. … When I was about 11, I got taken to a doctor who started prescribing me a lot of different medication, I think maybe a little too much medication, and I was taken out of sixth grade for a period of time because of all of the side effects and stuff. So I started to get a little more withdrawn, and then I started kind of experimenting with the pills on my own. I would say, ‘Well, what happens if you take three of these instead of the other ones?’ Then I had a seizure when I was 11 from taking too many of them and ended up in a psychiatric hospital for quite a while. I remember my mom said to me when she dropped me off, ‘Remember the characters and the stories.’ … That was the beginning, and then I continued to experiment with drugs and ended up getting addicted to opiates when I was about 13, 14. I went to a couple of different high schools in ninth grade and I got kicked out. I went to another high school for kids who’d been kicked out of high schools, and then got kicked out of that high school. Then I did a form of homeschooling, and also I went to an arts magnet school in New Haven, Connecticut, which was really wonderful. I studied printmaking and photography and writing. And so it was a very unusual high school experience, certainly not the traditional one.”

On Nick Reiner, the son of another famous filmmaker who also had addiction issues, but was unable to conquer them, allegedly resulting in the murders of his parents, Rob and Michelle …

“I knew Rob and Michelle, and [Rob] called me after the first season — he was very moved by the first season. Look, I think that when you’re doing drugs today, you don’t know what you’re taking. The drug world today is very different from how it was, and I think we see it across the country, where just one pill, one thing, could forever alter your brain chemistry, and there’s no coming back from that. It was just a horrific tragedy. Man, it’s hard to even talk about, to be honest.”

On the origin of Euphoria …

“When I went into HBO, it was for a general meeting with Christine Kim [original programming]. She had read the script to Assassination Nation — it was before I had gone to shoot it — and while I was there talking to her, she said, ‘We got the rights of this Israeli format called Euphoria.’ I remember thinking, ‘That’s a great title.’ And so she said, ‘Well, we’ll send it to you and just see what you think.’ So I went back and I watched it, and it’s sort of the Israeli version of Kids, is the best way I can describe it. It’s a wonderful series. But I didn’t necessarily know what they were expecting from it, or how faithful of an adaptation do you write. I go back in to meet with Francesca Orsi, who was the co-head of drama at the time, and I sit down and we just start talking, and we’re talking about life and about addiction. … I was very open with her, and she said, ‘Well, great, go write that.’ And I said, ‘What?’ She goes, ‘Everything we talked about.’ I said, ‘Well, OK, but how does it connect to Euphoria?’ She says, ‘I don’t know, you figure that out.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you like about it?’ She goes, ‘I just like how raw it is.’ I said, ‘Great. OK. So I should just write whatever I …’ She said, ‘Yeah, just everything we were talking about, just put that in the script.’ I said, ‘OK.’ And I’m walking out the door and she says, ‘Oh, can you do it really cheap?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She’s like, ‘I don’t know, $2 million an episode.’ I said, ‘Sure, no problem.’ And I walked out and thought, ‘Wow, I think I just got a job writing a pilot for HBO.’ So I go back home to New York. My wife, Ash, and I, just had a baby, our son, and I’m sitting there and I’m going, ‘OK, I’m writing a pilot for HBO, what do I do? Do I write the real version of it? Do I pull punches?’ And I’m thinking back to HBO when I was younger, and Oz and Sopranos and all of these shows that really kind of pushed the limits of what was allowed on TV, and characters that were dark and evil at times, and I thought, ‘There’s no sense in trying to play it safe here and write something that’s kind of down the middle. I ought to just go for something that feels honest and truthful, but also something I know hasn’t really been put on TV before.’ Because the worst that can happen is at least it gets their attention and they say, ‘OK, well, why don’t you pull back A, B and C?’”

On his creative philosophy and who is allowed to tell which stories …

“I think that it’s the job of the writer to give a piece of themselves to their characters, … You take your life experiences and maybe the hardships and the things you’ve gone through, and you try to put it into something that can transform it, so you can take the darkness of your own life and transform it into something that begets light. At least that’s how I view creativity and filmmaking. So in creating a character like Jules, who’s trans and new in town, I took, for instance, some of what I just told you about being in a psychiatric hospital at the age of 11, and I gave it to that character, and I mean everything down to the suicide attempts with the ginger ale can — that’s all real — and the knife scene in the kitchen. A character like Ali, Colman Domingo, was based in part on a sponsor that I had and a counselor that I had who helped get me clean, and helped kind of point out to me in various ways how I wasn’t the person that I wanted to be. There’s a lot of talk about, ‘How do you write diverse characters and how do you understand someone else’s experience?’ I think it just boils down to, if you’re giving them a piece of yourself and building upon it, it creates an authenticity and an emotional sort of anchor that allows for that character to be real and three dimensional and human, so I do it with every single character I write. And then when I cast an actor, I sit down, I talk to them — I talk to them about the character, I talk to them about their own life —  and then I go back and do another revision on that character and try to bridge a little bit of the gap between the character and the actor so that they also have a sense of ownership over that character and they want to protect that character. I think that’s the beauty of filmmaking, is, it’s this collaboration between writer, director, actors, crew, camera, grip, electric. Everyone is there from all of these different backgrounds, and you’re bumping up against each other and figuring out how to tell a universal story. … I think that it’s imperative that artists feel free to express themselves and to work towards a certain universality, whether that comes from specificity, and the specificity is what makes it universal, or however they get there. But I think that a lot of these debates and conversations have resulted in artists and writers feeling fearful about, ‘What can I do? What can I say? What can I write?’ And I think that that’s the death of creativity and it’s the death of the entertainment industry. I think you have to approach it with a fearlessness and a boldness, and just let the chips fall where they do.”

On making highly sexual shows — Euphoria and The Idol — in the immediate aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the Me Too movement …

“It’s obviously not the easy route. I knew that I would catch flack for some of the scenes in this show [Euphoria] and others. But at the same time, I believe that I have a responsibility as a writer and a filmmaker to reflect the world as it is. And Me Too aside, if you look at where the internet has gone over the last 15 years, it is further and further toward exploitation and sexuality, and it has only gotten more normalized, so to duck that massive trend that’s happening in culture felt like a cop out. I thought, ‘OK, well, this is the world that people are growing up in now, and if I’m going to be honest and truthful, then I’m going to lean into it. And I’m going to know how I run a set and know how I work as a collaborator, and know that there’s a difference between what I write and who I am, and also know that people are going to conflate the two, and be OK with that.’”

On the “social media mob” …

“I often think, ‘How is it possible that we’ve gone through the most politically tumultuous 15 years in recent American history, and yet our artistic response — Hollywood’s artistic response, in terms of film and television — is incredibly timid?’ It doesn’t make sense to me. I think that there was kind of a combination of factors that happened all at the same time. You had these sort of social media mobs, you had kind of political revolutions inside Hollywood that were a reaction to political revolutions that happened in the country, and it all became — it started to push a utopian style storytelling onto Hollywood in which characters were fulfilling political objectives as opposed to human objectives. I think that social media plays a large role in that. The first time that I found myself trending as the No. 1 topic in the country, it was a little unnerving, but I don’t know, I also think that it’s like, ‘You got to go against the mob. Historically, the mob is never right.’ … There’s not enough people in Hollywood who tell the truth, which is that the mob’s not actually going to destroy you. You are free. You’re free to say what you want, think what you want, and make what you want. And if you do it, it’ll only inspire more freedom and continue to break up the mob. You don’t have to follow the rules, and particularly in terms of storytelling, fan service is death. You have to make something for an audience who can handle uncomfortable truths, not fans who want their wishes fulfilled. I think that if anything, that noise and debate surrounding Euphoria, in particular, is what led to it becoming one of the biggest shows HBO’s ever had. And so the controversy, the debate, is not something to run away from, it’s something to run toward. It only generates more interest and curiosity in the show.”

On The Idol …

“I’m incredibly proud of The Idol and I think it’s going to age beautifully. It’s a hysterical show, a very funny show anchored by an incredible fearless performance by Lily-Rose Depp and a wonderful cast. And I’m not only proud of the show, I’m proud of how we made the show. … I’d written the script for The Idol, I’d written the pilot, and the show sort of got up on its feet. Euphoria season two was going at the same time, so I got sucked into Euphoria season two, write and direct all the episodes, finish Euphoria season two … which was one of the toughest things I’ve ever had to do in my life. [My wife and producing partner Ash] gives birth to our second son, Zeke, and two days later I’m at Abel [Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd]’s house, and HBO wants me to come in and fix The Idol. It was partially complete. They wanted to do re-shoots. I didn’t want to step on another director’s work and start to kind of cobble together things, so it came down to, ‘All right, well, how are we going to fix the show? Or do we just kind of go back to what the original script was and try to make a coherent story with $20 million?’ Which was the amount of money they were going to do for a re-shoot … I’m sitting in Abel’s house and looking around and going, ‘Well, this is a great location. It’s like 45,000 square feet.’ And we call up Lily-Rose and say, ‘So what you’ve been doing, well, how do you feel about doing another version of it?’ And she was happily on board. So we ended up having to pull all sorts of favors. We shot in Abel’s house, and we treated it a little bit more like a reality TV show, in the sense that Euphoria has a very specific kind of directorial style, but with this we wanted to feel like we were blurring the line between reality and fiction.”

On the long-awaited third and final season of Euphoria, released four years after the second, and how it was shaped by several real-life tragedies that occurred in between the seasons …

“I had already written a large majority of the season before the writers’ strike. Then the writers’ strike happened and Angus [Cloud, who played Fez on Euphoria] passed away. His character was the spine of season three at the time. He was someone I loved very, very much, and over the course of season two, I got him into rehabs and tried to keep him clean throughout shooting. I suddenly was confronted with not just the grief of it — he was 25 years old and a beautiful person — but also the practical implications of, ‘OK, well, what story am I telling now? Because I have to start this again pretty much from scratch.’ At that time, in 2023, 75,000 people were dying of fentanyl overdoses every year — it’s gone down a little bit since then — and I was thinking, ‘Well, how do I tell a story that kind of peels back the allure of addiction and desire and show the real consequences that lie behind it?’ Which is something I’d done for seasons one and two, but, ‘How do I do that in a way that I think is a little bit more frightening, because the consequences are more frightening, and this is a problem that’s only gotten worse?’ I mean, if you just compare it to, say, the Vietnam War, we lost 50,000 young people during the Vietnam War over a period of 10 years; we were losing more than that in a single year [to fentanyl] and it wasn’t on the front page of the New York Times every single day. So I thought, ‘All right, how do I tackle what feels like a real plague that’s happening, and also lean into the bigger, more existential questions: Why is life so fragile? What are we here for? Does God exist?’”

On the show’s connection to AA, and the wild west metaphor for season three …

“I started to imagine season three as sort of like a frontier myth: We’re entering a new era in America where economically there’s a lot of uncertainty, and where the internet has created a number of new industries, the consequences of which we don’t quite know yet. … If I look at the three seasons of Euphoria, I think of them in terms of the three steps of AA, the first being, ‘We came to believe that we’re powerless and our addiction’s unmanageable.’ Season two is, ‘We came to believe that only a power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.’ Step three is, ‘We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand them.’ I thought, ‘OK, if that’s the central throughline, how is it applicable to now?’ … What we’re seeing culturally, I think, is an intense hyper individualism, to the point where we’ve lost the greater cohesion of a society. Everything is about identity — your own identity — and less about who we are as a country. I thought that that was an interesting tension to explore, and also the illusions that surround us, whether it’s fame, social media, money, sex, drugs, the promise of reinvention. … We talked about the season as like a re-pilot. I wanted it to be a show that, if you hadn’t seen the first two seasons, you could still jump into it from here and enjoy it. It’s five years after high school, the characters are still pretty much in the same self-destructive cycles, it’s only gotten a little bit worse, and this is the story of what happens when you chase desire.”

On reports that Euphoria is finished …

“Season three is the last season of Euphoria. I feel immensely proud of what we achieved, I think it’s an important story, and I’m not sure where else to go with it. I think I’ve said everything I need to say about this world of addiction and desire and its consequences. For three seasons, we’ve pushed ourselves as filmmakers and as storytellers, and we’ve gotten incredible performances from and gave birth to a whole generation of actors and craftspeople, and I’m really proud of what we achieved. The show’s ratings only grew every season, so I think it’s good to go out on top.”

On what’s next for him …

“I’m in the middle of writing a feature right now that I’m very excited about, and hopefully I’ll have more to share very soon.”