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[Thisstorycontainsmajorspoilersfromtheseasonthreefinale[ThisstorycontainsMAJORspoilersfromtheseasonthreefinaleoftrance“And in God we trust.”]
Sam Levinson had a different ending for Rue, the main character played by Zendaya tranceBefore the death of star Angus Cloud. Cloud, who played drug dealer Vizco in the first two seasons of the buzzy HBO series, died in 2023 at the age of 25 from a fentanyl-related overdose while Levinson was working on the third — and what would become his final — season, which was released Sunday night.
In the season three finale, titled “In God We Trust,” Zendaya’s opioid addict, Rue Bennett, dies from a fentanyl-laced Percocet given to her by drug kingpin Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), in a sadistic move of revenge for her belief that she was working with the DEA. Brown eventually got what he deserved, when Ru Ali’s patron (Colman Domingo) killed him in a shootout (another scene that has changed since his debut, the actor revealed toHollywood Reporter) .
When talking on New York Times‘ popcast After the finale, Levinson explained that he had written a different route for Rue during the 2023 writers’ strike, but when Cloud died in July of that year, his death sparked the ending that viewers eventually saw — a finale that marked the end of the novel. trancehas now also been confirmed by HBO.
“I’ve always been really concerned about the spread of fentanyl. It’s something we’ve dealt with over the seasons and even in my first movie[[Another happy day (2011)],” Levinson, who is open about addiction recovery, said on the popular culture show. “But one time [Cloud] He died, so I had to rework the script and I thought, You can’t tell a story about addiction today without it having real consequences. Most people never get a second chance. Fentanyl can knock you out in an instant. It wasn’t like I was growing up; You can literally take pills off the street and you might have a bad trip or something, but you’ll be fine. This is something that hits close to home for many people in this country. So I felt it was the responsible thing to do.
The creator and writer have confirmed that this finale is intended to be the end, although the episode was not explicitly referred to as a “series finale” by the creator or the network. “In terms of the story we set out to tell, which is a story about addiction and its consequences, this feels like the end to me,” Levinson said. the trance The story is “a tragic one in the end – but also the truth.” “If you were experimenting or taking drugs today, it would very likely kill you.”
Levinson said that, with the entire group, he set out to undo “the delusions of the world we live in, whether ‘likes will satisfy your soul,’ whether love, money, fame, or drugs will provide escape,” referring to the story arcs of the other primary characters played by Sidney Sweeney, Jacob Elordi, Alexa Demme, Hunter Schaeffer, and Maude Apatow. “It felt like if we were really going to say something, we needed to put the audience in the position of a family member losing someone they love. I know how much I loved Rue and the audience loves Rue. I wanted to reflect that feeling.”
trance Viewers got this feeling while watching Rue’s death scene. Initially, viewers thought that Vizco — who was kept alive by Levinson on the show, and was put in prison as a result of the Season 2 finale — had escaped, and Rue was running out of Ali’s house to go rescue her friend. But when Rue returns home, the sequence of events turns into a hallucination and her crossing is slowly revealed.
During the final show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater in New York City on Sunday night THR Turned up, you could have heard a pin drop as a shocked audience watched Rue’s final moment. The sequence also brought back a glimpse of Storm Reid, who played Rue’s sister, brought back Nika King, who plays Rue’s mother, and included unseen footage of Rue and Fezco together in a tribute to Cloud.
Rue’s death became even more difficult after one season where her addiction wasn’t front and center. The life-and-death stakes were raised when the prequel high school series jumped five years to show Rue becoming a drug mule and working for rival gang bosses (Martha Kelly’s Laurie also eventually committed suicide). There was a four-year time gap between seasons two and three, which led to this jump, as well as rumors of conflict behind the scenes.
“You can go through different stages of addiction where you’re using every second of the day to feel like you have your life together. Maybe you smoke a little pot, you drink, but it’s not the most pressing issue,” Levinson explained of Rue’s addiction and season three’s death arc. “But that addictive personality is always underneath the surface. And in the end, she gets beaten up and her hand is cut off. I always thought of that as a window into whatever pain was going on in her psyche. She feels, ‘Okay, I’ll just take one.’ And I always imagine it’s the fentanyl that she smuggled into the country in the first episode.” [of season three, which foreshadowed her death]”.
When talking about this first show, Levinson said THR“I was really angry about fentanyl, because in 2023, the year Angus died, 73,000 Americans died from fentanyl overdoses. I couldn’t understand what it meant to our country that we were allowing so many people to be poisoned.”
Levinson also dedicated his final introductory speech to Cloud when he spoke to the audience at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater on Sunday, where he talked about telling a story about addiction and its consequences and how when life happens between the work, it shapes the story.
“We lost Angus this season,” he said before the show. “So many of you loved him the way I loved him. He had such a light that could fill an entire room and he deserved more time — a longer, fuller life. But he, like so many people in this country, was affected by fentanyl.” “Grief has a way of clarifying what matters. It strips everything down to the essentials. Your family, your friends, your faith…but even in the face of unimaginable loss, the decision to continue to hope, to believe in a better world, may be the very thing that can create that world.”
When talking to popcastLevinson also defended the sexualization of the series, explaining why some storylines ended up mirroring real life, and why some characters were downplayed.
“From the script, you can get an idea of what the role requires. So when you go to the audition, let’s use Cassie’s role [played by Sweeney]you know that the role requires a certain amount of nudity. Are you comfortable? If they’re comfortable, they get the role, and then the next layer is the intimacy coordinator. I think it’s SAG [Screen Actors Guild] The rule is that if an actor, after being acted, says, Actually, I don’t want to do thatWe can’t force them to do a scene. I strongly believe that the best and most honest performances are when the actor feels free and safe. “…So my job is to create the best environment for the actor to play this character,” he explained when talking about Sweeney’s OnlyFans story.
When asked specifically about the creative visions of both Nate (Elordi’s character, who died a horrific death in the penultimate episode) and Jules (Schafer’s character, who had less and less screen time), Levinson said the 178-day shoot was difficult logistically, as well as keeping the shoot within budget, but that “in terms of the story, I tend to look at it as a movie rather than a TV show. Sometimes the character takes a front seat, other times they take a back seat, sometimes they In a loop, and sometimes they’re not.
With Nate, specifically, he said, “All of his interactions and actions drive Cassie’s story, which becomes the bulk of the season, as opposed to every episode we’ll delve into his specific struggles. I think because the audience knows the history of these characters, everything is always a little bit, like, comparable to what you know.”
In the end, Levinson said he doesn’t see the ending as pessimistic.
“At what point do you say something is evil? If you’re selling poison to children and killing them, it’s evil. And what do you do in that situation? How do you confront it? How do you deal with it?” He said of the anger Ali Domingo discovered after Rowe’s death.
But then he continued: “We live in a very bad world. This is what Lexi does.” [Maude’s character] She says in that conversation with Cassie where she read the Bible. She doesn’t really understand it, but she knows that people are always dying and you have to keep going. There’s definitely a fragility there. But it’s a renovation of sorts. “If we can pull ourselves together and take care of our loved ones and maybe believe in something a little greater than ourselves, then we can build a future.”
tranceSeason 3 is streaming on HBO Max. Read more from THRThe final coverage is here, along with our cover stories with Alexa Demie and Colman Domingo.
