Maddy from Euphoria

This one is about Maddy, from "Euphoria."

CW: mentions of assault and abuse.

Ever since I first watched Euphoria, I’ve been a little in love with Maddy Perez. She is a cheerleader dating a football player — in Euphoria’s ensemble cast, what should be a recognizable high school film trope is far more than the sum of its parts. Maddy’s the opposite of the girl next door. Maddy’s got an edge. Maddy’s makeup sparkles. Maddy will put you in your place in a second. Maddy walks into any room with her shoulders flung back and her chin high. 

I’ve seen the show twice, but I mostly love watching compilation videos of Maddy’s best lines. When she’s talking with her friends in her bedroom and her dad opens the door she shrieks, “Dad! We’re like, all naked! God!” He closes the door and her face dissolves into a beatific grin. 

Maddy’s sarcastic. She loves to challenge, and to see how others will respond — if they’ll rise to meet her or squirm in discomfort, or some of both. In the bedroom with her friends is Maddy’s domain: she sparkles, shines, preens, and gossips. “I wish I had your collarbones,” she laments. Out in the real world, she’s fierce: take the infamous chili scene at the town’s carnival, where with a slow clap and a push of her hand Maddy embarrasses everyone in the vicinity — but is never embarrassed herself.  

Maddy’s played extraordinarily well by Alexa Demie, who’s a somewhat enigmatic actress with a rising star pedigree and a disputed birthday. I was shocked to learn, upon viewing a video of Demie demonstrating ’90s style makeup for Vogue, that she speaks with the exact same Cali-inflected drawl as Maddy does on the show. This particular cadence of Demie’s defines Maddy — with each line, she’s both high-drama and completely deadpan. Demie also had agency in shaping Maddy beyond just how she performs her lines: she came up with Maddy’s Casino obsession, teasing out these details of Maddy’s world that define her personally and aesthetically. Maddy-as-character also feels infused with Demie-as-character — her deadly serious irreverence, her deeply specific interests. 

One of my favorite interviews of all time was a conversation on the A24 podcast between Demie and the comedian Nathan Fielder — an unlikely pairing to begin with, as Demie is profoundly glamorous and Fielder professionally awkward. They talked about childhood acting classes, pretending to be an animal or inanimate object. They talked about a sunglasses business Demie used to run. They talked about crying. Throughout the interview, Demie and Fielder “yes, and” one another repeatedly — both of them are so essentially themselves that the interview comes to feel like an improvised scene between well-written sitcom characters. They speak with an ongoing sense of performance, as many of the most funny and bewitching people do: Maddy is one of those people, too. 

Euphoria is a show full of dynamite performances — for one, Zendaya won history-making awards in her fantastic lead role as Rue. So it probably shouldn’t be surprising that when I ask friends, few people share my favorite traumatized, glittery teen. Almost every character is given the airtime for a backstory, a memorable line, or a moment that resonates after finishing the series. 

When I told my boyfriend about my love for Maddy, he said he’d liked her. But he also said that he’d also been disappointed by what he described as a flatness in her character’s narrative: how completely her story was defined by her relationship with her abusive boyfriend, Nate.

I only spent a short time trying to argue against this — because he was right. Maddy’s arc begins and ends with Nate. When we first meet Maddy, she’s standing in front of her mirror applying lip gloss and fluffing her hair. “I literally look disgusting,” she says. Her friend calls Nate a loser. 

“He’s not a loser, he’s a dick,” she clarifies pointedly. 

At Nate’s party that night, she has sex with someone else in the pool. “That’s real classy, you fucking whore,” he lobs at her. “Suck my DICK,” she responds, holding his gaze for a moment before her face splits into a playful grin and she goes back to who she’s doing. 

When we last see Maddy, she’s slow dancing with Nate at a school dance, and crying while he rests his head on top of hers. “Most of the time I really hate how you make me feel,” she says tearily. “Meaning like, we shouldn’t be together.” 

“I know,” he murmurs back. 

Maddy loves Nate, pisses Nate off, tells Nate that sexuality is a spectrum, shields Nate, dances with Nate, fights about Nate with her mom, and calls Nate’s mom a cunt. As biting as she can be, her rage is perpetually oriented towards him. She fucks with Nate, too: she tells him she’s a virgin and she’s never been fingered, lying through her teeth with big, blinking eyes. It’s a fun joke to be in on, until you think about the fact that she’s doing it because she knows her virginity will be important to Nate — possibly a deal-breaker.

I’m used to having somewhat problematic opinions about TV shows, that sometimes almost feel like I missed something. I think I got too caught up in Euphoria to critique unprompted how Maddy’s world revolves around this irredeemable boy. And the critique is deserved, because Nate is beyond the worst — in the course of 10 episodes, he manages some transphobic catfishing, blackmail, domestic abuse, stalking, and grisly assault. Someone as sharp and funny and brazen as Maddy should leave Nate in the dust, without looking twice. But she doesn’t. 

A little while ago, I started thinking of Maddy as a modern-day, it-girl version of Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby was a law employee in a Herman Melville story who, when asked to do a task for his job, responded one day, “I would prefer not to.” This became his response to all questions from his employer, including eventual requests that he leave the premises — not an all-out refusal, but a simple statement of his desire to uh, not. 

We learn in Maddy’s backstory episode that she “doesn’t want to do anything.” Her mother works as an aesthetician, and Maddy notices that the women who come into her shop don’t seem ambitious or harried by responsibility. Because they’re rich, they just languish and have their nails painted. Maddy wants the freedom to do nothing all day — she’s not much interested in what else she’s supposed to want. 

We don’t often encounter such self-possessed, self-motivated refusal: we’re thrown when we do. Of course, Bartleby’s story ends in a prison cell where he refuses to eat, eventually dying out of a resistance to living in any way other than how he’d prefer to. It’s a damning indictment of where always saying no could get you in a world that doesn’t take kindly to refusal. We learn, in Maddy’s origin story, that she loved performing in pageants until her mom stopped her from competing because a pageant judge turned out to have been abusive. Is her resistance ultimately about disappointment? I always think of Bartleby as somewhat of a legend: look how confused people are, how disrupted their days become, by the simple swerve of being forced to bend to your preference. But the story’s ending reflects those forces that don’t need to, and won’t, bend or swerve: the forces of the state in Bartleby’s case, and of white patriarchal power in Maddy’s.

Teen girls have their desires dictated to them like high school movie scripts — I like that Maddy doesn’t purport to care about honor roll, or being a star, or proving something. But underneath all that not caring, she might also be throwing out the baby with the bathwater. In the wake of goals and ambition, there has to be something else. Maybe the real problem is that her goals, without being explicitly named or directed, take the shape of Nate. Spinning around in a fur coat for Nate. Performing like a porn star for Nate. Camping out secretly in hotel rooms for Nate, after he’s been arrested for abusing her. 

Euphoria has been lauded for its nuanced understanding of gender — in my opinion, the show’s narratives are leagues ahead of most other high school media out there. Jules, a trans character and Rue’s best friend/lover, speaks in one of the special episodes to the concept of gender-as-ocean, of moving toward something beyond femininity. McKay, a football player who struggles with competition and masculinity, is seen belying his sensitive nature when rough sex with his girlfriend Cassie becomes an outlet for his trauma and frustration. 

Again — there are forces that rarely bend or swerve around the kind of resistance that’s grinning and trying to fuck with you. So it also makes narrative sense that someone as powerful as Maddy would be, ultimately, still a teenage girl: powerless where it concerns someone like Nate. Because while she can make him jealous and hurt his feelings and insult his mom, she’s ultimately helpless where her safety is concerned: helpless to Nate’s desires, to Nate’s social cache, and to the way Nate makes her feel. She is pulled into his gravity.

In the YouTube compilations of Maddy’s best moments, one scene is particularly difficult to watch. Her class is viewing a documentary about how abusive relationships are not love, while the camera zooms in on Maddy’s set jaw, her hard eyes. “What are you looking at?” she challenges a classmate. She’s so determined to be right that she refuses to accept how much she’s hurting — that digging her heels in and staying with this boy is destroying her. 

I am of the opinion that everyone wants to be Maddy, and is a little scared of Maddy. But maybe I only think that because I want to be Maddy, a little, still. When she’s hurt, she hurts back. Her edges, her particular shine, are the qualities that I most admired in other girls as a teenager myself. I believed wholeheartedly in their invincibility. I wasn’t invincible, but of course I saw them as leagues ahead of me: the girls who were sparkly and mean like the girls on Euphoria seemed completely perfect. It’s easy to tear other teenagers down, but for me at least, behind my envy was always a holistic feeling of awe. In this awe, too, is that male-gaze-inflected desire to make teenage girls both bigger and smaller than what they are: to make perfect little dreams out of real people. 

Maddy gets to be a real person in the show, albeit mostly between its lines. In watching, I feel deeply protective of Maddy. I feel protective of her when she’s shoved against a wall with Nate’s hand around her throat, or lying on a bed with her head pinned down into the pillow while he yells, “Keep fucking talking!” Nate is terrifying, and Maddy isn’t usually known for being terrified — but imagining that she can’t be hurts her. It makes her not a person, but a character. Someone who isn’t there to feel at all. 

Ultimately, Maddy is at the center of one of Euphoria’s darkest storylines. And while throughout it’s impossible not to root for her to see herself as the important person in her narrative, it’s also impossible not to see Nate as the person who most threatens that truth. But this means that in rooting for Maddy, you actually root against what she wants for herself — against what she keeps doing and choosing, despite her assertions that she doesn’t want to do anything. 

I love Maddy for her contradictions, chief among them the coolness with which she moves through the drama of her life. But the character of Maddy is also a window into the pain and disappointment that threatens to stunt the lives of teenagers like her, no matter how all-powerful they seem in a high school world. Maddy’s cold power is an act. And to care about her is also to hope for a day, maybe beyond Euphoria’s script, when she stops pretending.