Did Maddy (Alexa Demie) know that Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) was hooking up with Nate (Jacob Elordi) all along? According to Demie, whose character finds out about Cassie and Nate’s tryst in season 5 of Euphoria, Maddy knows her friends all too well.
“Her instinct isn’t to distrust Rue, Maddy has always liked Rue and has had empathy for her. She knows everyone’s f**ked up in their own ways and she doesn’t ever want to judge her, [so] in that moment it’s very easy for her to trust Rue. She also knows when Cassie is lying. Maddy may ignore a lot of things in her life that she doesn’t want to face, but she’s intuitive and intelligent,” the actress told Entertainment Weekly of the scene where Rue (Zendaya) comes to Cassie’s house and is high.
This season, Maddy has less scenes with Nate, but in the latest episode — episode 6, which aired on February 13 — the handsome hunk enters her room with a gun. Eventually, Nate tells his ex that he knows she has the sex tape of his father (Eric Dane) and Jules (Hunter Schafer).
“I had a lot more time with Jacob season 1. Honestly with him, it just felt like a natural development in the relationship and what the Maddy-Nate situation would be, because we see Maddy breaking it off at the end of season 1, and then season 2 felt like we picked right back up where you’re in a breakup, but you see them out at a party, and you’re kind of still talking, and it’s a little on and off. It felt very natural in the way that it just picked up with Maddy and Nate,” she explained.
“It was an incredibly difficult scene not only because of the gun to my head, but because it was choreographed in a really specific way. We had to move with the camera movements and it was really broken up, and so it took us two days to shoot. It was basically all we did all day on those days,” she added.
As for why Maddy didn’t fess up that she had the tape in her bag, Demie said: “You know, I love Maddy because she’s incredibly tough, but she’s also incredibly vulnerable, and I think we really get to see those two sides of her. The duality between having that confidence, being really tough, and then being incredibly vulnerable. Nate is somebody she was with for a very long time and is very close to, and maybe for a second she thinks he’s bluffing, or she doesn’t think that he would actually go as far as to shoot her, which sounds crazy to say.”
Additionally, Demie loves filming with Sweeney, even if their characters are not in a good place. “Season 2 we definitely had to really have our Maddy-Cassie best friend moments,” she shared. “And that also feels very natural. I guess we just spent a little bit more time than we did season 1, when we weren’t filming, in our trailers and stuff. So that helped to develop that relationship.”
