Euphoria Season 3 premieres tonight at 9 PM ET on HBO Max. Eric Dane is going to be in it.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!Except Eric Dane died in February. He was 53. ALS took him on February 19, just weeks before the season he spent his final year making was ready to air.
He knew when he walked back onto set in 2025 that he was dying. His diagnosis had already gone public. Sam Levinson told him “I’ll take you in whatever way you want to show up” — and Dane came back anyway, reportedly returning to filming just four days after sharing his diagnosis with the world.
Tonight, for the first time, everyone is going to watch those scenes together.
If the Euphoria drama has felt heavy before anyone had even seen it — the premiere takes that heaviness somewhere new. Angus Cloud, who played Fezco, died of a fentanyl overdose in 2023. Now his co-star is gone too, his final performance preserved in eight episodes that start airing tonight.
At the LA premiere last week, creator Sam Levinson dedicated the season to both of them, alongside late producer Kevin Turen. “Death is what gives life meaning,” he told the crowd. He did not look like a man who was just making a speech.
Nobody Could Agree on Whether This Was Beautiful or Too Soon
When the Season 3 trailer dropped in late March, it divided people almost immediately.
One side saw Dane’s appearance — a brief glimpse of Cal Jacobs reconnecting with Jules — as exactly what it was: a final tribute to a man who came back to a set knowing his time was limited. He’d returned to filming four days after going public with his ALS diagnosis. He showed up anyway. For a lot of fans, watching him one last time felt like honoring that.
The other side wasn’t convinced. According to a RadarOnline report, sources reportedly close to the Dane family described seeing him in the trailer as “ghoulish” — too soon, too raw, the footage landing just weeks after his death.
Sharon Stone, who guest stars this season, offered a different kind of context. She told reporters that Dane had once come to her house with gluten-free cookies just to rehearse and talk through his Euphoria audition. “He really wanted that job,” she said. “It means the world to me that he got that job in time.”
In time. Two words that land very differently in 2026.
The Real Reason Euphoria Took Four Years
Levinson addressed the four-year gap between seasons at the premiere. Strikes. Scheduling. All of that played a role.
But his real answer was something else: the time, he said, was spent figuring out how to do justice to “those we lost.”
That framing changes how you watch. It’s not just a show anymore. It’s a memorial that happens to have a plot. And as the line between celebrity life and death on screen gets harder to navigate, tonight’s premiere will force millions of people to sit with that discomfort at the same time — tribute and spectacle all at once, with no clear line between them.
Whether Dane’s final performance lands as the goodbye it was meant to be, or whether seeing him on screen only sharpens the grief — nobody knows yet. That’s what tonight is for.
Season 3 of Euphoria is streaming tonight at 9 PM ET on HBO Max.
