Euphoria is one intense teen drama (what with all the drugs, violence, and camming) but offscreen, Jacob Elordi claims that things got so hardcore that he got a concussion during filming.
In the season finale, Elordi's (very problematic) character Nate and his dad Cal, played by Eric Dane, get into an all-out brawl. The scene ends with Nate violently smashing his head against the ground and Cal retreating into his office, terrified of his son. Elordi talked about filming that brutal scene in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
"It was physically grueling, but Sam [Levinson, the showrunner] and I kind of have this head nod when there’s an intense scene and the stunt guys would kind of lay it out for us," Elordi told EW. "And then when we give each other the head nod, it kind of means that we’re just going to go for it when the camera rolls. And Eric and I, we’re incredibly close, so I basically said to him, 'Let’s rock and roll and make it sort of as real as possible,' because I think it’s super important and he was on-board as well. So Eric fucking smashed me. I was bleeding. I got a concussion. I ended up throwing up after work. It was gnarly."
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Levinson, however, told The Hollywood Reporter that the Entertainment Weekly article was the first time he ever heard about Elordi getting injured on set.
"We take the safety of our actors very seriously and we had padded the entire floor with soft foam — that's not to say the fight wasn't physical, which it was — but we've got medics on set, we've got stunt coordinators, we have stunt doubles, we have a whole team of people that are looking out for our actors' safety in any number of these scenes that are physical," Levinson told The Hollywood Reporter of the scene. "So when I read that [interview with Elordi] I was a little bit stunned, I have to say, and something that I don't think he communicated to anybody on set because I would've heard about it. So I don't know, maybe he's still in character."
Dane and Elordi really gave it their all in the finale — something that Euphoria audiences expect from HBO's most hard-to-watch teen drama.
Refinery29 reached out to HBO, Dane, Levinson, and Elordi, for comment.