Chloe Cherry is an actor whose fame could hardly be more relevant. Since 2022, she’s starred on Euphoria, the zeitgeist-hijacking teen drama that catapulted Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi onto the Hollywood A-List.
On the series, Cherry plays Faye Valentine, a vulnerable runaway and drug addict. Faye is the type of girl who falls in love hard, even if it puts her in dangerous situations. Episode seven was a pivotal moment, where her loyalties were tested like never before and, in a shock twist, she turned away from her closest friend. “She’s suddenly realizing that she doesn’t have any friends on this earth,” says Cherry. “She just freaks out and is like: ‘What the fuck has been going on my whole life? I need to be away from all of you fucking people.’”
Lian Benoit
Euphoria’s third season, which concludes on May 28, has been inescapable for anyone with a smartphone. Picking up the story five years after this group of hedonistic teens graduated high school, season three feels tailor-made for the attention economy of today, where the algorithm encourages us to engage with polarizing and outrageous content. So far, we’ve seen OnlyFans storylines, fingers and toes being sliced off, gangster shoot-outs, drug stings, and sugar babies being mummified in cling wrap.
While Cassie (Sweeney) is making a killing on OnlyFans on Euphoria, Cherry has actually had a presence on the platform in the real world. There is a notable crossover between Euphoria—a fascinatingly meta show that explores the misogynistic extremes of the internet—and Cherry’s own story. After growing up in a conservative town in Pennsylvania, she flew to Florida at age 18 to star in adult films. Over the next five years, she appeared in over 200 films that generated over 120 million views on PornHub. From sugar daddies to paypigs to all types of custom content, her experiences with sex work make her particularly qualified to explore the central themes of Euphoria’s third season.
Instagram is where Sam Levinson—Euphoria’s creator and writer, who, depending on who you ask, is either an over-hyped controversy magnet or a once-in-a-generation creative genius—first spotted her. He sought her out to audition for the show after watching one of her Instagram stories, where she filmed herself people-watching shoppers at the mall. “Sam was like: “Whoa, I love how expressive your eyes were,’” she tells me. “He was like: ‘Oh my God, that’s the look that I want.’”
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