The Euphoria crew is all grown up, and some of them are settling into their post-collegiate era better than others.
For a Friday surprise, HBO took to Instagram to roll out the first photos of the main cast in season three’s time jump to show them now as young adults — the new season, coming April 2026, skips ahead five years from where season two left off. Creator Sam Levinson had recently shared where the main group of former high school friends, led by Zendaya’s Rue, has ended up, and now there’s photos to visualize it.
Starring addict Rue will find herself south of the border in Mexico and in debt to drug dealer Laurie, played by Martha Kelly, “trying to come up with some very innovative ways to pay it off,” Levinson had said.
Zendaya as Rue in season three.
Sydney Sweeney‘s Cassie and Jacob Elordi‘s Nate are now engaged and will eventually get married during the season, but Cassie finds herself “very addicted to social media and envious of what appears to be the big lives that all of her high school classmates are living at this point in time” while settling into the suburbs with a domesticated-looking Nate (below).
Cassie’s caption reads: She has never ever been happier.
Hunter Schafer‘s Jules is in art school “very nervous about having a career as a painter and trying to avoid responsibility at all costs”; Alexa Demi’s Maddie is working at a Hollywood talent agency for a manager while having “her own side hustles”; and Maude Apatow‘s Lexi is working as an assistant to a showrunner who is played by new castmember Sharon Stone, Levinson had previously shared.
Levinson said that “being out of the safety net of school” is what the new season is about. “The one thing we all agreed on is we can’t go back to high school — although many, many shows have had 30-year-old high school students, we’re not,” said the writer/director/executive producers. “Five years felt like a natural place [to jump] because if they had gone to college they’d be out of college at that time.”
New castmembers this season include Danielle Deadwyler, Eli Roth, Natasha Lyonne, Rosalía, Marshawn Lynch, Sam Trammell and Asante Blackk, to name a few. While Eric Dane, who was recently diagnosed with ALS, Chloe Cherry, Dominic Fike, Nika King and Colman Domingo are returning, missing from the cast this season are Storm Reid, Austin Abrams and Javon Walton. Angus Cloud, who played fan-favorite drug dealer Fezco, died July 2023.
The long-awaited return of Euphoria is coming more than four years after season two premiered on HBO, with the unusually long hiatus being due to a number of factors — including aligning the schedules for the in-demand cast, Levinson’s other HBO series The Idol in the interim, and a cooling relationship between Levinson and star Zendaya, as The Hollywood Reporter detailed in a cover story last year. The series initially launched in 2018. Here’s a reminder of what happened at the end of season two.
