How Angus Cloud’s remarkable Euphoria performance showed a star was born

Unlike his already well-established co-stars like Zendaya, a former Disney star, and Elordi, known from Netflix hit The Kissing Booth, Cloud was scouted by a casting agent while walking on the street in New York. He initially thought it was a set up, he told GQ: “I was confused and I didn’t want to give her my phone number. I thought it was a scam.”

What Cloud brought to Euphoria was vital to its success. Amid the show’s often whiplash-inducing plot twists and anxiety-inducing pace, Cloud was a stabilising, almost grounding presence: stoic in his demeanour, despite Fezco often being involved in much of the most terrifying action in the series.

In another actor’s hands, Fez might have been an overwrought, melodramatic stereotype – a macho, drug-dealing blowhard – but Cloud had a deadpan, understated quality that made the character feel authentic. “I had to change it a little bit,” he explained to GQ about amending the Sam Levinson-written script. “To make it sound real, like how I would say it.”

It obviously worked: as Cloud revealed to GQ, his co-star Elordi let slip to him that Fez was never meant to be a returning part. “I think Jacob told me, he was like, ‘oh yeah, you didn’t know? Your character gets [imitates brains getting blown out]'” he said, “I don’t know, but apparently, because they cast me off the street, I guess the character of Fezco was [never meant to stick around]. I don’t even know how. I never saw that script. No one ever told me.”

A many-layered performance

Cloud played a complex character of contradictions – a caring drug dealer, a gentle gangster, a protector and an enabler – and had exactly the depth and the range needed to depict them. His scenes with Zendaya, as his addict friend Rue, demonstrated this; he was crackingly intense as he showed Fez grappling with the idea of selling Rue the very thing that could kill her, set against his almost paternal desire (he often referred to her as “family”) to protect her from the underworld that he worked in.

To some extent, Fez was the voice of the show’s complicated conscience, flipping from mild-mannered soul into menace when wreaking revenge on those he believed deserved it: Nate, who Fez viciously attacked after he blackmailed and tormented Rue’s girlfriend, Jules and Nate’s hateful dad Cal, who had videoed himself abusing teenagers. What happens when the “bad” guys might be better than the “good”, upstanding members of society, the show asked? And can we forgive people’s actions when we understand their own traumatic backstories? These were questions that Cloud embodied.

Meanwhile Fezco’s gently understated and heartwarming flirtations with Lexi (Maude Apatow) were a real source of fan joy, and the scene where he sung Stand By Me with Lexi – “one the most beautiful moments I’ve ever watched,” in the words  of one Twitter user today – has now an acquired an extra poignance.

If Euphoria’s first series in 2019 established Fez as a compelling presence, it was the second series in 2022 that really deepened him as a character – particularly the first episode of the run, which focused on Fez’s origin story, highlighting how important to the show the character had become. It was a story that had parallels with Cloud’s own life. In Euphoria, we see a young teen Fez being accidentally hit in the head with an iron crowbar by his drug-dealing grandma, and in real life Cloud also suffered brain damage from a head injury, aged 14.