What’s Ailing ‘Euphoria’? Tragedy and Trauma Inside TV’s Buzziest Show
On a sunny day last November, the grief-stricken family and friends of producer Kevin Turen gathered at the Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, then made their way to a reception on the Warner Bros. lot. At just 45 years old, Turen had been driving with his 10-year-old son in the car when he suddenly slumped over, having suffered a cardiac event. His son managed to stop the car and call for help.
A true cineaste with a zest for life and a long list of independent film credits (Arbitrage, The Birth of a Nation, Pieces of a Woman), Turen was beloved by many. Among the mourners that day were Robert Pattinson, Andrew Garfield and Zac Efron. Zendaya, the star of the biggest success of Turen’s career — the culture-rattling HBO series Euphoria — missed the funeral but attended the reception.
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Absent from the gathering altogether was Sam Levinson, the temperamental writer and director behind Euphoria and the ill-fated series The Idol, which was intended to launch The Weeknd’s acting career. Levinson not only had been Turen’s very close friend but also his partner in their Little Lamb Production company — until Levinson shocked many who knew both men by cutting ties with Turen earlier in the year. The reasons were mysterious to all but a handful of close associates.
The Turen family had made it clear that Sam and his wife, Ashley, were not welcome at the funeral. In the months before his death, Kevin had lost not only his partnership with his close friend but his lucrative deal at HBO as well. (Despite the breakup, Levinson helped him get a favorable settlement, a knowledgeable source says.) Friends say Turen constantly felt under considerable financial pressure. He worked nonstop and neglected his health, but some of his loved ones thought the breakup had put Kevin under “inordinate” additional stress for several months, “which took its toll,” as one source puts it. (A24 and Levinson’s agent and Turen’s close friend, WME agent Andrew Finkelstein, paid for the burial plot, and HBO paid for the reception. In honor of Turen’s love of sushi, the event — attended by several hundred guests — was catered by Katsuya.)
The partners had been a study in contrasts. A person close to both men recalls Turen as “a gregarious, outgoing guy who loved to eat, loved to have fun, wasn’t abusive, wasn’t a yeller,” while Levinson is “a big, successful, aloof, somewhat narcissistic artist.” He adds, “People resent Sam for lots of reasons, and nobody resented Kevin.”
A bit of hyperbole, perhaps, but certainly Turen was more popular than his partner. While Levinson could be generous and kind, he also had a tendency to become overwhelmed and angry. “Sam was so stressful to everyone around him. He is a person who needs to be handled,” says a source who worked on a Levinson-Turen production. His obsessiveness meant he has “no off button. He would shoot all night, if he could. He always wants to push boundaries and shock people a little bit. He needs someone to curate his thoughts and ideas.”
Levinson’s relationship with Turen wasn’t the only one that had frayed. Zendaya, once such a close Levinson acolyte that she frequently hung out at his house, had cooled toward the mercurial filmmaker. Another insider says that as she pulled away, Levinson began to resent her. And then there was the issue of Levinson’s wife, Ashley, who has taken on Turen’s duties but who brings a more aggressive personality to the work. Levinson, Ashley and Zendaya all declined to comment for this story.
Meanwhile, Euphoria fans eagerly awaited a third season, or even a low-bar announcement that one would be coming. The last episode aired way back in February 2022, and the supposedly high school-age stars were only getting older and breaking into success in the movies. The delay had been such that HBO had allowed the top stars to book other projects while awaiting an acceptable idea for another season. Finally, after months of speculation about whether there would ever be a season three, HBO announced July 12 that key castmembers had signed on to return, aiming for a January start date.
But given the big personalities involved, and the chaos that seems to swirl around Levinson, simply signing up the talent (who already had contracts that had to be tweaked in light of their successes) doesn’t mean executives at HBO can relax. It falls to chief Casey Bloys and head of drama Francesca Orsi to pull this vexing third season of Euphoria together … and keep it together. It might be the ultimate executive challenge: persuading various difficult talents to row in the same direction after there have been real or perceived betrayals of trust. And there has been tragedy — the real kind, involving not one but two untimely deaths.
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During the first two seasons of Euphoria, Zendaya and Levinson “were thick as thieves,” says a source involved with the production. “She found him to be an inspiring director and she knew she was embodying him” in her role as drug addict Rue. (Levinson had gone to rehab at 19 to get off opiates and methamphetamines.) Having won two Emmys for her performance, she had shadowed Levinson on set during season two with an eye toward directing in season three. The pair were close enough that they collaborated on — and largely self-financed — an indie movie, Malcolm & Marie, during the pandemic.
Enter The Weeknd, aka Abel Tesfaye. Turen initially connected with him through producer Aaron Gilbert, then running Bron, where Turen had a film deal. Sources say both Turen and Levinson became enamored of the multiplatinum pop star, who harbored serious acting ambitions. Turen and Levinson jumped in to produce Tesfaye’s high-profile acting debut, The Idol, also for HBO. Levinson wrote a spec script for the pilot but was not supposed to spend too much time on the project because he was still occupied with Euphoria‘s season two; other writers and directors would handle the heavy lifting. But with Levinson, things often don’t go as planned.
Eventually, as Levinson wound up spending far more time on The Idol than anticipated, Zendaya’s frustration grew. Levinson had not yet delivered scripts for Euphoria‘s third season — scripts that are still a work in progress more than two years after viewers watched the last episode of season two. Zendaya was so perturbed that she asked for a meeting with HBO’s Bloys and Orsi, demanding to know why the network allowed Levinson to turn his attention to another show — an HBO show, no less — with Euphoria hanging in the balance.
Sources say her unhappiness deepened in March 2023, after Rolling Stone published a blistering article alleging that with Levinson at the helm, production on The Idol had gone “disgustingly, disturbingly off the rails” — chaotic and overbudget, with a toxic work environment. The show told the story of a fading pop star, played by Lily-Rose Depp, who becomes ensnared in a masochistic relationship with cult leader Tedros, played by The Weeknd. According to Rolling Stone, crewmembers were calling the series “sexual torture porn” featuring the “rape fantasy” of a “toxic man.”
Zendaya had nothing to do with The Idol but was swept up in fan backlash for a project she hadn’t wanted Levinson to take on in the first place. Sources note that she was already a seasoned actress when she appeared in Euphoria at 22, and she closely tracks the mood on social media. “Her image is pristine,” says an executive who has dealt with her. “And fans were turning against Sam,” urging Zendaya to distance herself.
Months later, with the relationship having curdled, there was another meeting at HBO with Zendaya, Levinson, Bloys and Orsi, ostensibly to discuss creative issues. But HBO execs who hoped the gathering would help bring about a reconciliation between director and star wound up disappointed. “They went from being so close, and they couldn’t fix it,” says a source involved with the show.
Another issue arose: Zendaya has told HBO executives that she doesn’t want Ashley Levinson to be the only executive producer on season three. With Turen gone, Zendaya is not the only person involved with the show to feel that way. Sources say Ashley is a very different proposition from Turen — more sharp-elbowed than conciliatory and, above all, fiercely protective of her husband.
“Sam needs somebody else beside Ashley,” says a talent rep with a client in the show. “He needs a voice of reason, and Kevin was a genius at that.” An insider adds: “Sam really is a big talent, but he needs managing, and if you’re a spouse, it’s tough. He needs boundaries, he needs deadlines. It’s hard for a spouse to set limits. You’re setting yourself up for failure.”
Of course, with many players involved, there is more than one take on what has gone awry with Euphoria. A source close to Levinson blamed Zendaya for dragging her feet with an eye toward a burgeoning film career that would soon include not only the studio franchises Spider-Man and Dune, but Luca Guadagnino’s Cannes entry Challengers. “It was all about her,” says one source. “Everybody wanted to make it about Sam, but it was her.”
Sources say at least one of Zendaya’s co-stars — Sydney Sweeney — was eager to return, specifically with Levinson at the helm. Though the delays have caused her to miss out on some big paydays, a source in her camp says pointedly: “She’s looking forward to going back to Sam Levinson’s Euphoria. She feels very strongly about Sam and his work.” Jacob Elordi, the other co-star with the most traction in movies, has been “aloof” and ambivalent about returning, says a source, but now he has re-upped. Elordi’s reps did not respond to a request for comment.
Levinson’s first crack at an idea for the new season, in which Zendaya was to be a private detective, was rejected by both HBO and Zendaya. Zendaya’s idea that she could play a surrogate mother also was a nonstarter. But HBO sources say that there is finally the beginning of a thaw between writer-director and star, and an inkling of an idea that will work. “Good luck to us,” says one person closely involved in the show. “Who knows what the hell will happen.”
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In May 2023, Levinson and the stars of The Idol traveled to France for the show’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. By then, Levinson’s split with Turen was a done deal, and Turen was not invited to attend even though he had brought the project to Levinson and was an executive producer on the series.
At that point, “Sam was on top of the world,” says one associate. “He got everything he wanted. His ego was unstoppable.” At a press conference the day after the show’s premiere — and an afterparty that raged until 5 a.m. — Levinson sat on a panel with members of his cast.
Naturally there were questions about the Rolling Stone article. Depp answered briefly that the piece “was not reflective at all of my experience shooting the show.” And Levinson said the allegations were “completely foreign to me,” adding that when his wife read it to him, “I looked at her and I said, ‘I think we’re about to have the biggest show of the summer.’ “
The Idol was not the hit of the summer. It was a very public and expensive misfire, savaged by critics and the public alike, now sitting at a dismal 19 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
From Levinson’s perspective, this failure was part of a year that had been in many ways difficult and even tragic. There was, of course, the constant drumbeat of bad press. Then came the split with Turen, followed by the failure of The Idol. And last July brought a crushing blow: the death of Angus Cloud, who played the drug dealer Fezco on Euphoria.
Levinson had tried his best to help the 25-year-old actor get off drugs — there were interventions, and HBO paid to send him to rehab. Nonetheless, Cloud’s mother found him in his childhood room, dead from a staggering cocktail of methamphetamine, cocaine, fentanyl and benzodiazepines. “He was too special, too talented and way too young to leave us so soon,” Levinson said in a statement at the time. “I hope he knew how many hearts he touched. I loved him. I always will.”
A few months later came Turen’s shocking death. (Turen also was close friends with Jay Penske, CEO of The Hollywood Reporter‘s parent company, PMC. Penske declined to participate in this story.) The Sam-Kevin split had come as a shock to many who knew how close their relationship had been — and how Turen was always, even when on vacation, at Levinson’s beck and call.
Journalist and screenwriter Nick Bilton, who shadowed Levinson on season two of Euphoria and was a writer on The Idol, remembers the interplay while working on the show. Turen was breaking story, he says, and encouraging the team to keep at their work.
“Kevin had this joke, he was always saying in a funny accent, ‘You’re being creative! Creative!’ Sam is — I’ve never seen anyone write as fast. It is mind-boggling. He doesn’t just write, he actually becomes the character. Sam does the voice, sometimes he wears the clothes.” Levinson once wore a dress while working on Euphoria, and, Bilton says, “On Idol, he was wearing one of the shirts that Abel’s character was going to wear. He put on the sunglasses. It’s almost like Method directing.”
But multiple sources say that even with Turen in the picture, Levinson, as a sober addict, was still obsessive and hard to control — firing out ideas, writing and rewriting at lightning speed, wanting to shoot for hours on end and missing budget and schedule targets. Levinson’s approach has led to repeated changes in personnel, starting with the first season of Euphoria. As Levinson was still a relatively inexperienced director at the time, says a studio source, “the [initial] idea was to have multiple directors and writers. But he operates the way he operates.” The plan changed.
In a September 2023 interview with the Hungarian outlet Punkt, Canadian photographer and artist Petra Collins alleged that Levinson had called her to say he had written a show inspired by her work and asked her to come and direct. Collins said in the interview that she had spent five months in Los Angeles working on the show’s aesthetic and casting, only to be dismissed because she was “too young” to direct. When she later saw a billboard advertising Euphoria, she said, she burst into tears.
“I was shocked,” she told the magazine. “This was the aesthetic that I built all my life and now I have to change it because it [entered] the mainstream and it’s been taken away from me.” Levinson declined to comment, but a “source close to Levinson” told The Daily Beast, “As a fan of hers, he was hoping there was a possibility they could work together in that way. But by no means was anything promised.”
Up next was Augustine Frizzell, who was hired to direct the pilot. “Sam was over her shoulder the whole time,” a source says, adding that “the DGA came at least twice” because of his interference. Says another insider: “Sometimes he was totally cool and chill, [but then] he was pacing and vaping and wringing his hands that he wasn’t the one directing the show.” Frizzell departed, and Levinson took the helm. “By season two, we realized that he was never going to have any other directors” work on the show, says a studio insider. (There were a couple of exceptions in the first season.) Frizzell declined to comment.
With Levinson writing and directing nearly every installment, Euphoria ran late, costing several million more than the planned $6 million per episode (though an HBO insider says that even so, the costs were not out of line with other shows on the service). “Every day was a fight,” an insider says. But Euphoria was a hit, and a giant draw for the Max streamer. Season two, which drew more than 16 million viewers per episode, was HBO’s second most-watched show at the time, after Game of Thrones.
Stories about what was happening behind the cameras on Euphoria flowed, with analysis of every plot point and every hint of dysfunction. Vulture ran a February 2022 article headlined, “A Timeline of Euphoria Obsession and Sam Levinson Hatred.” The Daily Beast ran its story laying out allegations of a toxic set, with workdays that sometimes stretched from 15 to 17 hours (not unheard of on Hollywood sets). There were reports of actresses questioning why they had to be in the nude for certain scenes. (Sources say those issues were worked out when they pushed back.)
“There were probably legitimate grievances [on Levinson’s set] as there are on any set, but there’s an agenda with Sam that I think is fucking bizarre,” says Bilton. “I’ve never seen this kind of microscope applied to anyone else. He’s not taking sides in politics. He’s making content that ruffles people’s feathers.”
Some fans started criticizing Levinson online for having a one-man writers room that by definition lacked diversity (though the show featured a very diverse cast). A female director, brought in to add a woman’s perspective to the show, had been ousted. And the Vulture timeline ended ominously: “With Levinson already branded a menace to society ahead of the season-two finale, the most obsessive viewers are questioning whether the director can even do his job.”
The same pattern was repeated — only much more expensively — on The Idol. Levinson’s involvement was meant to be limited. He had written a pilot on spec, though HBO had not expected that as he was still working on Euphoria season two. The series was quickly greenlighted despite the skepticism of several HBO executives. Amy Seimetz (co-creator of Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience) was brought in to direct all episodes, and there was a writers room overseen by Joe Epstein. But with production well underway, sources say, The Weeknd had soured on the work and asked Levinson to get involved. At that point, Seimetz had shot five and a half of six episodes. HBO tossed all the material that Seimetz had produced, an estimated $60 million worth, and the original team was sidelined. With no scripts in hand, HBO allowed The Weeknd and Levinson to come up with a different story and Levinson took the helm as writer and director of the reconceived show. (The Weeknd, who did not respond to requests to comment for this story, later told Vanity Fair that Seimetz’s departure was due to scheduling conflicts. Seimetz declined to comment.)
A source who worked on the earlier version says he finds it shocking how much latitude HBO was giving Levinson. “I know Euphoria‘s a hit, but it’s not Game of Thrones,” this person says. When the first Idol team was dropped, this person adds, “It was just this level of being so easily disposed of that really affected me.”
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Having been barred from Turen’s funeral, the Levinsons invited a rabbi to their home and held their own version of a memorial service with a small group that included Levinson’s agent, WME’s Finkelstein; his manager, Stuart Manashil; and his publicist, Alan Nierob. Both Finkelstein and Manashil had been close friends with Turen, and the split with Levinson caused them not only professional but great personal grief. And Turen’s sudden death took away the possibility that the relationship would be repaired. The weight of that cannot be measured.
Many people who knew and worked with Turen and Levinson are still unclear about what finally destroyed the partnership. One such person says she assumed Turen had finally walked away from the constant demands of catering to Levinson. But at a lunch last summer, Turen told this person that it was Levinson who had cut ties. “I said, ‘I’m shocked. Why?’ ” this source recalls. Turen responded, “He didn’t like that I was working with another filmmaker.” He didn’t elaborate. “Kevin was reticent to ever say anything negative about anyone,” the source says. “He was heartbroken. … He was so loyal to Sam.”
According to several sources, the split came about because Turen had another piece of business with The Weeknd — a film starring him and Wednesday star Jenna Ortega. Financed by Live Nation, sources say, the $20 million-plus film has been sitting in postproduction for a year and, according to sources, prospective buyers aren’t biting. Some sources say Turen had not told Levinson about the project and that Levinson felt betrayed when he found out about it. After all, the movie was competing with The Idol — another project with music, starring the same artist.
A source caught between the two men says it wasn’t so out of the ordinary for Turen — a Hollywood producer, after all — to play things a little fast and loose, making moves without looping in his partner. “He knew he fucked up,” this person says. “He had done this kind of stuff before, and this time it wasn’t OK.”
Turen contended that he had told Ashley Levinson about the project, but she expressed no interest and, according to this version of events, never mentioned it to her husband. But several sources say Ashley denied knowing anything about the movie. And there are still other takes on the situation. Some sources who worked with the partners say the movie wasn’t a secret at all. Even if it were, “Who cares?” says a talent rep who had a client in the mix. “You don’t own Kevin. I think Sam wanted to blame someone for the failure of The Idol.”
Many who watched the drama play out feel that the punishment was not merited by the alleged offense, and they believe that some sort of reconciliation between the two partners would have come about in time. “They loved each other,” says a member of Levinson’s team who believes that the two would have reconciled eventually had Turen not died. “It’s a bummer because, in a way, they made each other better. Kevin pushed Sam in the right direction, but they weren’t Kevin’s ideas. They were a fantastic duo, and that’s what’s heartbreaking.”
This story first appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. This version was updated on July 22 to include new details about the production timeline of The Idol. Click here to subscribe.
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