Angus Cloud Was ‘Euphoria’s Indispensable Man

The first thing that struck me about Angus Cloud was that he was beautiful. This is not surprising in the context of his show, Euphoria, where everyone is beautiful. Zendaya? Beautiful. Hunter Schafer? Beautiful. Jacob Elordi? Beautiful. Sydney Sweeney? Beautiful. Alexa Demie, Colman Domingo, Barbie Ferreira, Eric Dane, et cetera? Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, et cetera. This of course is a not-uncommon phenomenon on television — you won’t find a lot of uggos in the core cast of, like, Game of Thrones either — but it’s particularly striking on writer-director Sam Levinson’s fever dream of the teenage wasteland. On Euphoria, everyone and everything is shot to look beautiful, even the ugliness. And that’s where we’ll find the real appeal of, and the indispensable role played by, Angus Cloud.

There are two distinct kinds of ugliness on Euphoria, which is the secret to its addictiveness and success. The first is the everyday kind, the dark side of teenage reality: bad parties, bad parents, bad friendships, bad relationships, bad sex (even when it’s good), and lots of lies and drugs. This is the ugliness the show’s protagonist, Rue, and most of her friends usually inhabit, whether via the comparatively high-stakes situation of Rue’s addiction or the relatively low-stakes issue of who’s fucking who behind whose back. 

Cloud’s character, the kindly, drawling drug dealer Fezco, exists on the border of this ugliness. He’s like the comically ineffective scarecrow in The Lord of the Rings that marks the limit of Samwise Gamgee’s experiences of life in Middle-earth until he embarks on his fateful journey. You don’t want to know what’s beyond Fez’s convenience store, metaphorically speaking. 

But it’s a nice place to visit, right? In Fez, the Euphoria kids have found the ideal provider of party favors: a kind-hearted, loyal, trustworthy guy quietly brimming with street wisdom and willing to listen if you ever wanna talk. Hell, even at his young age the dude’s practically a family man, raising his stepbrother and caring for his gravely ill grandmother. I want to buy drugs from the guy. 

Then there’s Euphoria’s second kind of ugliness — an elevated ugliness that isn’t the stuff of everyday life, or even necessarily the stuff of over-the-top teen melodramas on TV. Though it doesn’t get discussed a lot as best I can tell (though to be fair, Euphoria discourse is generally dreadful and puritanical enough to require a warning scarecrow all its own; I don’t wander too far from home when reading about this show), Euphoria is, when it wants to be, one of the most exciting crime thrillers on television.

Sometimes this entails the psychotic schemes of Elordi’s Nate Jacobs — Patrick Bateman in a letterman’s jacket. Sometimes, particularly though not exclusively in Season 2, it entails the drug scene, presented here as a network of children with face tattoos, flat-affect ex-schoolteachers who threaten to sell children into sexual slavery, several threatening bald men straight from central casting for creeps, and Sam Peckinpah shootouts with the cops. This material reads closer to Breaking Bad than an R-rated Degrassi. 

And once again, there stands the scarecrow named Fezco, our entry point into this world. His connections wind up being the show’s most frightening figures (excluding the Jacobs boys). His calm demeanor provides crucial contrast with the fury and fear exuded by everyone else in this demimonde, even by his own kid brother Ashtray. It’s his role to warn and prepare Rue and company if and when they decide to cross that threshold, and to punish figures like Nate for their own criminal rampages. Fez is Euphoria’s Virgil, guiding us Dante-like into the underworld. 

I’m not convinced any of this would work without Angus Cloud. Using physical gifts that seem to come naturally to him — his soulful eyes, his stoned-immaculate speech patterns, his underplayed but still bewildering good looks — he bends it all to the singularly difficult task of playing a person at home in both worlds, capable of surviving exposure to both kinds of ugliness. Cloud is — was, goddammit — the gateway through which Euphoria travels back and forth between gritty teen melodrama and crackling crime thriller. In a very real way, Angus Cloud made Euphoria possible.

Consider Fez’s Season 2 storylines. He must be equally convincing as the unlikely new best friend of Maude Apatow’s shrinking-violet kid-sister character Lexi, helping her come out of her shell; the tough-love dealer-with-a-heart-of-gold who closes his door on Rue when she’s desperate to use; the can-you-believe-this-shit interrogator of Dane’s Cal Jacobs, the man whose sins have directly or indirectly caused Fez’s young friends so much grief; the 0-to-100-real-quick avenger of Zendaya’s Rue and Schafer’s Jules who beats Nate to a bloody pulp in full view of dozens of partygoers as a warning to never fuck with them again; the desperate man pleading with an army of cops and his own feral baby brother not to shoot. 

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Right there you can see that Cloud’s range is astonishing, and this is what the contention that “he’s just playing himself” gets so wrong. Cloud and Fez may have had a similar vibe in casual conversation. But to access the comedic timing required to pull off that blackly hilarious interrogation scene, in which he conveys the largely accurate idea that the Jacobs’ lives are even more fucked up than his own? To convincingly portray a guy so thoughtful and attentive that a good girl like Lexi would grow closer to the town’s top drug dealer than to any of her own girlfriends? To voice the audience’s anguish as the adorable little psychopath Ashtray goes down in a hail of cop bullets? And to seem like exactly the right person for the job in every scenario? Any one of these tasks requires real talent, real effort, real work as an actor. Cloud did it all, and did it so seamlessly and so absent of ostentation that many viewers didn’t even notice his labor.

And when I say he’s the gateway between Euphoria-as-melodrama (complimentary) and Euphoria-as-thriller (also complimentary), I mean it. Take a look at the episode I consider to be the show’s masterpiece, the fifth ep of Season 2, “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.” It’s a showcase for Zendaya first and foremost, as she has a mortifying emotional battle with her friends and family when they attempt interventions to get her clean. It’s absolutely savage work by Zendaya, as raw and riveting as any of the New Golden Age dramas of yore.

But by the end of the episode, all the manipulation and gaslighting and guilt-tripping is over. Rue’s no longer lambasting her mother for being a shitty parent or accusing her best friends of betraying her or airing out other kids’ dirty laundry to take the focus off of her — she’s on a high-speed foot chase with the cops, breaking into houses, jumping over fences, landing in catctuses, and generally participating in crime thriller antics. Again, the transition is so seamless that you barely realize you’re suddenly watching a different kind of show until you’re knee-deep in some unsuspecting family’s backyard with the police on your tail.

What happens in between? Fez. When Rue has exhausted all of her family and friends, it’s Fez she turns to. When she tries to rob Fez’s grandmother’s meds, it’s Fez who turns her away. She approaches him via the show’s first brand of ugliness, the reality of addiction and confrontation, and departs him for a journey deep into the second variety, the heightened kill-or-be-killed reality of a Boogie Nights, a Pulp Fiction, an American Psycho. Fez is the fulcrum.

Through it all, there’s Angus Cloud, an actor capable of playing a reluctant tough guy and delivering reluctant tough love, perfectly at home in both worlds and thus still feeling independent of either. That he can do this within a single sequence, as he does earlier in the season when he shifts from befriending Lexi to pummeling Nate with a simple excuse-me, is further evidence of his gifts. 

It’s hard to imagine Euphoria without him, given the load-bearing role he played in the structure of the show. But much more than that, I don’t want to imagine Euphoria without him. At just 25, Angus Cloud had demonstrated so much brilliance already. I grieve to think of all the new ways he would have shined.

(This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.)

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.