After four seasons of ambiguity about exactly what Sydney Sweeney’s character Cassie Howard believes (if she believes anything at all beyond her own reflection) Euphoria has finally, decisively, answered the question of where she, or her income source, stands.
In Season 3, Episode 5, Cassie is a Republican. Or at the very least, she is playing one on a series of manosphere podcasts. Does the show believe there’s a difference?
This article contains spoilers for Euphoria Season 3.
What Actually Happened In Euphoria Season 3 Episode 5
Cassie’s OnlyFans account has exploded after influencer Brandon Fontaine’s endorsement pushed her past 50,000 followers. With Maddy (Alexa Demie) now operating as her manager and the money flowing, the next stage of the growth strategy involves Cassie going on a podcast tour to generate engagement through outrage. The results are exactly what Maddy had in mind.
Cassie declares that American men are treated as second-class citizens. She then delivers a line to a visibly stunned and cameoing Trisha Paytas that compares a man expressing traditional domestic preferences to screaming a racial slur.
When a male podcast host observes that she sounds like a Democrat, Cassie looks directly into the camera, grins, and says, “I’m not a r***rd.”
“The angrier these idiots get, the more money you make,” Maddy tells her. It is the clearest thesis statement the show has offered about what Cassie’s arc is actually satirising, and perhaps the most damning line about its own audience.
Why This Is The Show’s Most Pointed Meta-Commentary Yet
The scene is, unmistakably, about Sydney Sweeney as much as it is about Cassie Howard. Sweeney has spent the better part of two years navigating a public image that has made her simultaneously a conservative darling and a target of progressive criticism, which is a conflict driven largely by comments she made in 2023 about her family’s political views and compounded by subsequent controversies.
One remembers, of course, her “Sydney Sweeney has great genes” commercial with American Eagle, which she later refused to address when given the chance in an Elle interview.
As Variety’s analysis of the season noted, the show is acutely aware of the baggage Sweeney brings to the role, and has been deploying it deliberately throughout Season 3, from Cassie’s camgirl persona to her cheerful leveraging of male attention for commercial gain. The podcast sequence is the most direct engagement with that meta-narrative yet.
W Magazine’s episode recap noted explicitly that the scene is “clearly a meta-commentary on Sydney Sweeney’s ongoing MAGA allegations.”
Cassie’s position in the episode is also internally contradictory. She spent her wedding reception insisting to Nate that she had no intention of being a cooking-and-cleaning housewife, and is now, for money, telling podcast audiences that men who want exactly that are being silenced.
Hm. Sounds vaguely familiar to me.
The Irony The Show Can’t Quite Escape
There’s a version of this critique that would be airtight if the show weren’t implicated in what it’s satirising. Sam Levinson told a Hollywood Reporter Directors in Focus event that Sweeney “becomes brilliant when pushed on set.”
That’s a genuine compliment, but also one being offered during a season that has generated substantial fan backlash, with audiences on social media describing Cassie’s arc as a “humiliation ritual”, a characterization that Fox News covered as part of its reporting on online reaction to the season.
Euphoria Season 3, starring Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and Alexa Demie is currently streaming on HBO Max.
