Since the first season of Sam Levinson‘s HBO series “Euphoria,” one of the show’s most pleasurable recurring motifs has been its use of prologues in which we get a crash course in a particular character’s backstory. These prologues, which often play like self-contained short films in a different style, period, or genre than the rest of the show, have largely been absent from Season 3, but the last two episodes have brought the practice back — creating two of the season’s most memorable sequences in the process.
The sixth episode of Season 3, “Stand Still and See,” opens with a 1978-set origin story for strip club impresario Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), who learns to be both entranced by and wary of women when he sees his beloved mother (Danielle Deadwyler) betray the man who loves her for money. In Episode 7, “Rain or Shine,” we get a look at recurring character Ali’s (Colman Domingo) life as a drug addict before he cleaned up and became a sponsor to “Euphoria” heroine Rue (Zendaya).
Both prologues are reverse-engineered from the rest of the series to tie in with where we know the characters will eventually end up; in the case of Alamo, the visual design is particularly interesting in the clues it provides to links between his childhood and his later tastes. “Young Alamo’s relationship with his mother speaks to the choices that he’s made as an adult,” production designer François Audouy told IndieWire. “You can see the seeds being planted.”
Audouy, costume designer Natasha Newman-Thomas, and the rest of the crew carefully drew a line from Alamo’s childhood to the environments over which he exerted total control as an adult, like the Silver Slipper strip club. We’re told early in the series that Alamo picked all the decor in the club himself, so its color palette and Western style is incorporated into the apartments where he lives with his entrancing and treacherous mother in the origin story sequence.
“You see that progression through costumes as well,” Newman-Thomas said, explaining that when Alamo’s mom comes into a little bit of money, one of the first things he gets is a new pair of cowboy boots. Newman-Thomas also worked closely with Auduoy to make sure that the high heels Alamo’s mother wore at a key moment would match the enormous leg adorning the Silver Slipper, and collaborated with set decorator Anthony Carlino to make sure all the clothes strewn about the apartment were things Alamo’s mother actually would and could wear.
That ties in with a core guiding principle of the show’s filmmaking, which Newman-Thomas and Audouy describe as a kind of improv — the idea being that they want to provide Levinson and the actors with the tools they need to change things on the fly or pursue new ideas as they arise. “In Ali’s backstory, the set is a full two-bedroom apartment,” Audouy said. “You could wander around, and open all the drawers, and make whatever you want in the kitchen.”
Every videotape and album in the apartment was carefully chosen to reflect something Ali would watch or listen to, not only for the sake of accuracy but so that if Levinson or Domingo suddenly decided they wanted Ali to put something on the turntable, the vinyl would keep both the actor and the audience in the moment. “It opens up Sam’s direction to be able to say, ‘Go put on a record,’ and know that because François is doing a beautiful job, it will be a record that belongs there,” Newman-Thomas said.
For Audouy and Newman-Thomas, the prologues are extensions of the work the filmmakers do for all of the characters throughout the series — they just provide an opportunity to dig a little deeper and luxuriate in the details. “I talk about backstory in all the sets, for all the characters,” Audouy said, explaining that it’s important to “imbue the scenery with details that give us clues that are implied in the script but in between the lines. The script doesn’t tell you anything about backstory, so you have to create that through set decoration and costume design.”
To that end, Audouy and Newman-Thomas create detailed timelines for the characters so that they can visually convey exactly who the character is and where they’re at in their life in any given scene. “For example, we have a timeline of Ali’s firefighting history, when he was in the military and exactly what happened, when his kids were born, when his relationship ended, the different chapters of his drug problems,” Audouy said. “The whole thing is mapped out, and everyone gets a copy of that so that everything on the set — everything that’s on the walls, everything in the drawers — it all lines up to the specifics of that backstory.”
The costumes line up as well, particularly in the way Newman-Thomas dresses Ali in rugged, working-class clothes indicative of his firefighting background (there’s also the old fire department shirt he works out in). She and Audouy also collaborated on all the photos in Ali’s apartment. “For his wedding photo, we talked about what year that would be and what bridal gown would be appropriate,” Newman-Thomas said. “We were working together constantly on those details.”
The attention to detail extends to characters we meet in the origin stories who don’t end up becoming part of the regular cast, like Natasha Lyonne’s sex worker, whom Ali gets together with after his family life crumbles. One particularly expressive accessory is a wrist brace Lyonne wears, which Newton-Thomas felt would indicate where both she and Ali are in their lives at the time. “I thought it would bring more realism to the character, and to bring her down to where Ali is emotionally,” Newman-Thomas said. “She’s a working girl, and there are injuries from the job.”
Both Newman-Thomas and Audouy immersed themselves in period research for the Alamo prologue, which didn’t have a date or location specified in the script. Audouy pitched Levinson on the idea of 1978 Chicago, which allowed him to use Michael Schultz’s classic coming-of-age film “Cooley High” as a reference point. “That was shot in the Cabrini-Green housing projects, and I thought it would be interesting to think of Alamo as a character who grew up in the projects and then had this sort of rags to riches to rags story set in the context of the Midwest of 1978,” Audouy said.
To create the wardrobe for Alamo, his mother, and the other characters in the prologue, Newman-Thomas scoured vintage catalogs and magazines — not just from the late 1970s, but from earlier decades. “The characters shouldn’t look like they stepped out of a Sears catalog from 1978,” Newman-Thomas said. “They’ve been collecting clothes for 20, 30, 40 years. Especially for something like the church scene — when someone’s buying their church clothes, it’s an investment that hopefully they’ll be able to wear for the rest of their life.”
Audouy, Newman-Thomas, and Carlino were able to coordinate these decisions with each other and other departments (the evolution of Alamo’s mom through not only her clothes but also her hair and makeup is particularly impressive and effective), partly thanks to a setup at Warner Bros. where their offices and the stages were all in close proximity. It allowed, Auduoy said, for a circular process in which everyone was constantly inspiring each other and building on each other’s work.
“It was nonlinear, and I think creativity loves nonlinear thinking,” Audouy said. “It’s not like there’s a creative formula that equals a sum. It’s more about going back over and over and constantly massaging the work.”
“Euphoria” airs Sunday nights on HBO and is currently streaming on HBO MAX.
