The Season 3 premiere of HBO’s Euphoria ended with Alamo Brown pointing a gun at Rue and shooting an apple off her head, and Adewale Akinnuoye-agbaje says the moment was meant less as a threat than a trial. The actor, who plays Alamo Brown, said the scene was filmed in Palmdale, California, on a hill at midnight in freezing cold weather, with wind blowing at about 35 miles an hour.
“And I’m standing there in some Speedos and cowboy boots. So, as exotic as it might have looked, it was freezing cold!” Akinnuoye-Agbaje said of the shoot, adding that there was “definitely an apple” in the scene. He said he did not really shoot anything at Zendaya and that the effect was done with “camera trickery.”
He also had warm words for Zendaya, calling the time they worked together “A lovely time” and describing her as “generous, very intelligent, and not precious with any of the material.” He said she “can turn it on and off,” and recalled that when a scene called for mud to be thrown in her face, she told the crew, “Chuck the mud in my face!”
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In Season 3, Rue is five years later, in debt to drug dealer Laurie, played by Martha Kelly, and working as Laurie’s drug mule. Laurie sends Rue to deliver drugs to Alamo Brown, a strip club tycoon, and Rue enters his house while he is throwing a party. Impressed by the house and the women there, she asks him for a job. The situation turns when one of Brown’s employees drops dead from the drugs Rue delivered, and Brown takes her outside to shoot an apple off her head in retaliation.
Akinnuoye-Agbaje said viewers may wonder whether Brown really intended to kill Rue, but he sees the encounter as “a test of her character.” “Had she flinched and run, I think he might have shot her,” he said, adding, “He is a marksman, as we’ll see throughout the series. This guy knows how to fire a bullet and hit its target.”
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That makes the scene the opening move in what the actor described as “the beginning of their relationship.” Brown is “testing” Rue to see if she is “eligible” to enter his world, he said, and he thinks Brown “sees something of himself” in her. “This is the world that she is now stepping into. I think it’s a great prelude to the rest of the season,” he said. The line now set by the premiere is clear: Rue has moved into a far more dangerous orbit, and Brown is deciding whether she can survive it.
