Sam Levinson has revealed why he decided to kill off Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi) in the shocking penultimate episode of Euphoria season three.
In the episode, Nate’s mounting debts to a dangerous group finally catch up with him, resulting in him being abducted and buried alive in a cramped, coffin-style enclosure for three days as his wife Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) scrambled to secure enough cash to save him.
Things only grew more terrifying while he was trapped underground when a rattlesnake made its way into the box, creating one of the show’s grisliest moments so far. By the time Cassie and Maddy (Alexa Demie) managed to persuade Alamo to help uncover the burial site, Nate had already succumbed to several venomous snake bites.
Why Nate Jacobs was killed off in Euphoria
Levinson revealed he wrote the character’s death as he knew fans wanted to see Nate get his “comeuppance” in the final season.
“There’s this kind of funny thing where I know what the audience wants in terms of justice or karma,” he shared in an interview with Esquire.
“And with that in mind, I always think, ‘Well, how can I give it to them?’ How can I give them what they want, but make it so horrific and anxiety-inducing that by the time it happens, the audience isn’t so sure they wanted it?”
Levinson said he intentionally gave Nate such a brutal ending in the hope that audiences would be left questioning whether the character really deserved such a fate.
“That feeling of complicity with the audience is always an interesting note to play inside of this sort of larger structure,” he explained. “You end up going, ‘Oh God, I don’t know. Should he have had it better? Did he deserve it?’ Those kinds of questions are always exciting to pose to the audience.”
The movie that inspired the death scene
Elsewhere in the interview, Levinson revealed the gruesome death scene was inspired by one of his favourite films, the 1973 cult classic The Candy Snatchers.
“I always loved the movie The Candy Snatchers where the girl gets buried alive with a pipe as an air hole. So I had imagined that Nate would get buried alive,” he revealed.
He also spilled some behind the scenes intel from filming the scene, including the fact that they used “all real rattlesnakes” and hoooooly hell.
“When we were shooting with the rattlesnakes out in Lancaster, [California], they said, ‘If you get bitten by a rattlesnake, you have about an hour before you die. And unfortunately, the nearest hospital’s an hour and a half away. So… don’t get bitten by our rattlesnake’,” Levison recalled.
He continued: “It was one of those gorgeous L.A. days where it was perfect weather. We’re listening to Otis Redding. The windows are down and we’re driving to Warner Brothers and I’m looking out the window. I just had this image of a rattlesnake coming towards this pipe. He’s banging and the snake can sense the movement in the ground. And I thought, ‘What if the snake goes into the pipe and then he’s stuck inside the coffin with this rattlesnake?’”
As for our Aussie darling Jacob Elordi, he seemed to be pleased with how it all went down!
“That was a cool way to go. Nate was someone who has made so many mistakes and made so many dark choices,” he said during a segment that played after the episode. “It’s cool to see it all come to what it’s come to.”
The final episode of Euphoria drops next week. Gird your loins!!!!!
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