Sultry and Unsettling at the Same Time: The Most Memorable 'Euphoria' Sex Scenes So Far
It’s been five years since Euphoria first premiered, and thanks in large part to the show’s scandalously controversial depiction of recreational drug-use and sex, the buzz surrounding HBO’s adolescent drama has only skyrocketed. Euphoria sex scenes famously don’t shy away from taboos, including full-frontal male nudity: Who could forget in Season 1 when 30 (yes, 30) penises appeared in one brief locker room scene? (Euphoria creator Sam Levinson once told The Hollywood Reporter that there were originally slated to be “like 80 more” in the shot.)
“We wanted to portray the sex and the sexual situations as awkwardly as possible in the way that most sexual situations are when you’re younger,” Levinson added of Euphoria’s sex scenes in a 2019 interview with the outlet. “They’re kind of dumbfounding. And our camera movement and our shot selection is far more rigid. The camera is normally not moving—they’re statics, they’re close-ups on faces, wide shots … Sometimes you just want the camera to just be still because you can’t look away.”
While some scenes can be hard to look away from, however, many are downright hard to look at. Several of the show’s scenes are dark, including a statutory rape scene (none of which we’ve included in this story, for obvious reasons). Prior to the Season 2 premiere, Zendaya (who plays main character Rue) warned fans on Instagram that Season 2 is “deeply emotional and deals with subject matter that can be triggering and difficult to watch.”
As Levinson references, the buzzy series also includes plenty of coming-of-age moments for the complex characters. “When I read the script I was like, ‘This all makes sense and I want to do it,'” Alexa Demie, who plays Maddy, told Vogue, of her nude scenes, adding, “[They] pulled me out of my comfort zone.” She continued, “I think everything that we do in the show we’re not like glorifying it. I think we show all the consequences.”
Because it will likely be some time before we see what unfolds on Season 3 of Euphoria, we’ve rounded up some of the show’s most scandalous scenes from Season 1 and 2. (Warning: Spoilers and NSFW content ahead.)
Related: What We Know About Euphoria Season 3
Euphoria Sex Scenes
Cassie and McKay have sex for the first time (Season 1, Episode 1)
This video is age-restricted and available only on YouTube. Click here to watch.
The show’s first sex scene sees Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) and McKay (Algee Smith) hooking up for the first time. When McKay tries to choke her, she immediately stops him. Rue’s (Zendaya) voiceover narrates, “Now, I know this looks disturbing, but I promise you, this does not end in rape,” before flashing to graphic porn clips she says are “basically what you’d see” in the “20 most popular videos on PornHub.” McKay and Cassie go on to discuss the moment.
“It’s about consent inside of sex, but it’s also about agency and being able to own up to what you want, what you don’t want, when you want it—and it’s also about acknowledging when you have crossed a line or made a mistake,” Levinson told The Hollywood Reporter of the scene, adding that he’s “not interested in having things that feel like they’re teaching a lesson for everyone as opposed to exploring the kind of nuances of what leads to an uncomfortable situation like that.”
Cassie has an intimate moment with her carousel horse (Season 1, Episode 4)
While technically not a sex scene, Cassie has an NSFW moment while riding a carousel horse during a drug and drama-filled night at the carnival. The scene is later mimicked onstage in Season 2, when Lexi throws a play, prompting Maddy to now-famously wonder “Is this f--king play about us?” Made obvious through the reprisal of, shall we say, specific scenes like this one, the answer was clearly yes.
Although you likely wouldn’t watch most of these Euphoria scenes with your grandparents, Sweeney’s whole family has seen some of her steamier Season 1 scenes. She’s said that she invited them to the premiere, not thinking about the sexual content. “I invited my grandparents, my uncles—I was like, ‘It’s a Hollywood premiere, you’ve got to come!’” she said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. “And we were all sitting next to each other and [it was a] giant screen, like ginormous screen…I wasn’t thinking. I was so excited.” Her grandparents’ reaction? “They said I have the best tits in Hollywood,” said the actress.
Ethan performs oral sex on Kat in the bathroom (Season 1, Episode 6)
This video is age-restricted and available only on YouTube. Click here to watch.
Unsurprisingly, the Euphoria characters don’t spend Halloween trick or treating. After a tense—and sexual tension-filled—conversation at a Halloween party, Ethan (Austin Abrams) works up the confidence to get Kat (Barbie Ferreira) alone in the bathroom. After she teases him for being a virgin, he quickly shows her he has skills in, well, other areas—all while she’s dressed in a nun costume, no less. Thank goodness he remembers to remove his vampire teeth first.
While this scene might not be something you’d want to watch with your mom, Ferreira’s mom is unfazed. “I’ve warned her several times [about the sex scenes] and she’s like, ‘Who cares if you have a sex scene? It’s art!’” the star told Showmax Stories in 2019.
Related: Watch Bridgerton‘s Sex Scenes—And Find Out What the Cast Said About Them
Nate and Cassie hook up in the bathroom (Season 2, Episode 1)
This video is age-restricted and available only on YouTube. Click here to watch.
After Cassie takes off her underwear in Nate’s car, the pair first hook up in the bathroom while a New Year’s party rages on. (After all, it may be a new year, but it’s the same Nate Jacobs.) Maddy (Alexa Demie), Nate’s ex and Cassie’s best friend, soon knocks on the door, leading Cassie to panic and seek refuge in the bathtub. Following the Season 2 premiere, Sweeney spoke with Cosmopolitan about filming sex scenes, calling the process “technical and not romantic.” She added, “There are people staring at you, pads between you; there’s nipple covers and weird sticker thongs all up your butt.”
As this is Euphoria, the first sex scene of Season 2 is soon followed by full-frontal male nudity; an unnamed guest at the party (Ansel Pierce) uses the bathroom while Cassie hides out. While some of the show’s actors, including Eric Dane as Cal Jacobs, use prosthetics, Pierce set the record straight on TikTok about his own half-naked scene, saying “yeah that was me.”
Nate’s dream about Cassie (Season 2, Episode 2)
This video is age-restricted and available only on YouTube. Click here to watch.
On Euphoria, even the character’s dreams involve lots of gratuitous nudity. Nate’s fantasy sees him hooking up with Cassie in front of a fire and her lounging naked on a bear rug—and later cradling a baby bump. When asked how he feels about getting naked as Nate, Elordi said on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, “You have no choice—every scene is like, ‘He sleeps with this person, he does this with this person naked.” The actor added that it “comes with the territory” of his “macho jock” character, but explained that the show’s intimacy coordinator is “a second mother” while shooting the scenes, “she’s like, ‘Are you comfortable? Are you okay?’”
Sweeney meanwhile has said Levinson was receptive to her notes on scenes with nudity. “There are moments where Cassie was supposed to be shirtless and I would tell Sam, ‘I don’t really think that’s necessary here,'” she told the Independent. “He was like, ‘OK, we don’t need it.'” She also discussed the impact of the sexier scenes on her career at first, saying “I’m very proud of my work in Euphoria. I thought it was a great performance. But no one talks about it because I got naked,” said the actress. “I do The White Lotus and all of a sudden critics are paying attention … They’re going, ‘Oh my God, what’s she doing next?’ I was like, ‘Did you not see that in Euphoria?”
Related: Everything We Know About The White Lotus Season 3
Kat’s Game of Thrones fantasy (Season 2, Episode 2)
Speaking of fantasies, it seems Kat’s a fan of a different sex-filled HBO show. While we know the fan fiction-loving teen has written some pretty steamy stories before, her Game of Thrones-themed dream is certainly a lot more, er, vivid, than paragraphs on a page. A warrior pops up in her bedroom and kills her boyfriend Ethan—who he proclaims a weakling—shortly before he has sex with her. Watch the scene here.
Elliot teaching Jules how to perform oral sex (Season 2, Episode 4)
This video is age-restricted and available only on YouTube. Click here to watch.
When Jules (Hunter Schafer) performs oral sex on Rue for the first time, she’s too high to have a euphoric experience, and instead fakes an orgasm. After Jules recounts the moment to Elliot (Dominic Fike), he shows her how to perform oral sex on girls, putting his mouth to her hand to show her how it’s done. The two soon start making out and seem about to put the lesson into practice until Rue shows up.
“The intimacy coordinator was amazing as far as being able to create clear boundaries and navigate a scene,” Schafer told The Hollywood Reporter after Season 1 about filming sex scenes. She added of her character in the same interview, “I think one, all Jules really wants is romance despite the constant highly sexual hookups she has. I think the way she wants to engage people is with some form of love and care.”
Cal’s coming of age (Season 2, Episode 3)
The opening montage of Cal’s (Eric Dane) backstory is filled with risqué scenes. For the first time, we get a glimpse at the character’s own high school days, when a young Cal (Elias Kacavas) started hooking up with his now-wife Marsha (Rebecca Louise). The one he really wants, however, is his best friend Derek (Henry Eikenberry), a mutual attraction that’s confirmed in a steamy makeout at a bar.
Dane said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he felt the way Cal’s backstory was handled was “pretty deft,” adding, “I love the actor that played young Cal. He was just fantastic. And you knew there had to be some sort of cause or condition that was placed on Cal for him to turn out the way he turned out, which is this horribly complicated, terrifically conflicted, and confused person who’s trying to figure out his journey, at however old he is, and start living his truth.”
