Prayers and Paychecks: The Euphoria Season 3 Trailer Reveals What Happens When Broken Teenagers Grow Up
The wait is finally over, darlings, and it’s more devastating than we ever imagined. On Wednesday, HBO unleashed the first trailer for “Euphoria” season three, and if you thought high school was harrowing, wait until you see what adulthood has in store for our favorite beautifully damaged characters. This isn’t just a return—it’s a reckoning.
Four years in the making, the new season catapults us five years beyond where we last left Rue Bennett and her circle of troubled souls. What emerges is a portrait of post-adolescent survival that’s equal parts spiritual awakening and moral descent. The official logline reads like a theological treatise: “A group of childhood friends wrestle with the virtue of faith, the possibility of redemption, and the problem of evil.” Heavy stuff for a show that made glitter tears iconic.
Emmy-winner Zendaya returns to her career-defining role as Rue, but this iteration appears markedly different from the girl we’ve known. The trailer reveals her seeking solace in newfound faith, sitting contemplatively in church pews, offering prayers where once there were only pipes and pills. “A few years after high school, I don’t know if life was exactly what I wished, but somehow, for the first time, I was beginning to have faith,” Rue’s voiceover confesses with the weary wisdom of someone who’s survived their own destruction.
But redemption rarely comes without a price. Martha Kelly’s chilling Laurie—the teacher-turned-dealer who became season two’s nightmare fuel—returns to haunt Rue about unpaid debts. Some demons, it seems, don’t disappear just because you’ve found God.
The rest of the ensemble faces their own adult reckonings. Jacob Elordi’s Nate has traded varsity jackets for construction gear, while Sydney Sweeney’s Cassie has descended into the world of digital intimacy work, selling photos and videos of herself online—all while engaged to Nate in what promises to be the most dysfunctional marriage since “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” The juxtaposition is quintessentially “Euphoria”: wedding planning meets webcam performances.
Hunter Schafer’s Jules appears estranged from her former soulmate Rue, with Maude Apatow’s Lexi asking the question that hangs like smoke in the air: “Have you heard from Jules?” The silence speaks volumes. The trailer suggests Jules has become a sugar baby, another choice born from desperation dressed up as empowerment.
Creator Sam Levinson, who wrote, directed, and executive produced this season, made a bold technical decision that mirrors the narrative expansion. Season three was shot on brand-new KODAK motion picture film stock in both thirty-five and sixty-five millimeter—making it the first narrative television series to shoot significant volume in sixty-five millimeter. The expanded image format literally widens the frame to reflect the characters’ journeys from high school hallways into what the press release calls “the wider, wilder world.”
The returning star-studded cast includes Eric Dane, Alexa Demie, Chloe Cherry, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Toby Wallace, each presumably navigating their own versions of survival in a world where teenage dreams have curdled into adult compromises.
If this trailer proves anything, it’s that “Euphoria” remains unafraid to examine the most uncomfortable truths about what happens when damaged children become damaged adults. The sex, drugs, and violence promised aren’t gratuitous—they’re geological, the visible fault lines of lives built on unstable foundations.
