Sydney Sweeney opens up on her ‘Euphoria’ character’s idea of love

Los Angeles, June 11 (IANS) Hollywood actress Sydney Sweeney, who essays the role of Cassie Howard in the superhit streaming series ‘Euphoria’, isn’t quite ready to let her character go.

Cassie Howard’s story has concluded in the show but the actress is yet to have a closure, reports ‘Variety’.

The actress, already an Emmy nominee for the second season of ‘Euphoria’ in 2022, dove even deeper into the character for the recent third and final season.

The actress feels that her character is alien to the concept of love, as she told ‘Variety’, “I think that, unfortunately, she doesn’t know what love is. I think that she had a bad example with her dad. She didn’t grow up with an idea of what a healthy relationship looks like or what a healthy version of love is. Then, throughout high school, she gets treated terribly by boys, she’s just a piece of meat and a token”.

“She learns that all they want from her is her body, so that sets up an element of her not respecting herself and not looking for the right things in guys, because they’re not looking for the right things in her”, the actress added.

As per ‘Variety’, she still thinks about what else Cassie might get up to. Over the course of eight episodes, Cassie, whom we’d last seen as a painfully insecure high-schooler, experienced endless milestones of grown-up life, getting married to boyfriend Nate (played by Jacob Elordi), facing down her household’s bankruptcy and working as an OnlyFans model to pay the bills (and Nate’s debts).

Throughout, the show’s trademark surreality and sense of play allowed the actress to act out massive emotional swings and to edge into the absurd, as in a sequence where Cassie strides through Los Angeles, towering over buildings and dominating the men below.

Cassie has been a calling-card role for Sweeney, who had never played a part this meaty when the show launched in 2019. Since then, Sweeney has scaled up her ambition in acting and producing; never busier, Sweeney could well receive another Emmy nomination this summer. Given the role’s frank sexuality, it’s also sparked yet more of the endless conversation and controversy that seems to trail her.

In a conversation while on a break from the Australia set of anime adaptation ‘Gundam’, the actress said that she believes, or hopes, that when separated from the noise of the present moment, ‘Euphoria’ will age well, and that some of her critics might think, as she puts it: “Maybe we all had this very wrong”.

Every season, we never knew if we were going to be doing a follow-up season, so by the end of Season 1 or Season 2, I was having this bittersweet moment of continually saying goodbye to Cassie every single time. And because there are such big time jumps between each season, yes, I’m coming back to the same character, but I’m coming back to a different place in her life.

–IANS

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