Jules is the most tragic casualty of Euphoria's final season

Hunter Schaefer's complete absence from season three would've been a kinder send-off for her character.

By Saloni Gajjar  |  June 2, 2026 | 12:00pm
Photo: Eddy Chen/HBO
TV Features Euphoria
Jules is the most tragic casualty of Euphoria's final season

The most shocking part of Euphoria‘s supersized series finale isn’t Rue Bennett’s fatal fentanyl overdose—it’s the realization that, somehow, the episode is continuing on without Zendaya. And in that remaining hour of runtime, creator Sam Levinson hardly allows Rue’s loved ones (or the audience, for that matter) to process and mourn. Instead, “In God We Trust” ends with a Quentin Tarantino-esque shootout in which Ali (Colman Domingo) avenges Rue by killing Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje). Like the rest of Euphoria‘s wildly inconsistent third season, the finale is all over the place, a result of its writer-director’s appetite for style over substance. In the run-up to Ali’s revenge, Rue’s former East Highland High School classmates Lexi (Maude Apatow), Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), and Maddy (Alexa Demie)—the characters who made Euphoria fascinating to begin with—are frustratingly sidelined. None of them suffers as much from this neglect as Rue’s ex-girlfriend, Jules (Hunter Schafer). 

Schaefer, who practically co-led Euphoria for two seasons alongside Zendaya, doesn’t get a single line in the finale. She barely has a minute (out of roughly 97!) to show her character’s grief, which she does by tearfully painting a portrait of Rue while choosing to remain trapped in her sugar daddy’s high-rise apartment. It’s the show’s noncommittal, lazy way of providing “closure” to the romance between Jules and Rue—a once-striking, thoughtfully depicted, even if turbulent at times, relationship. Jules’ presence throughout season three is so scattered and superfluous that if her storyline were entirely removed, it wouldn’t make a difference. And not including Schaefer in the show’s return from its lengthy hiatus would’ve been a kinder ending to Jules’ arc. 

Season three lets down all of its returning cast members, but the short shrift to Jules blatantly disregards Euphoria’s strongest qualities: No matter how gratuitous and over-the-top the first two seasons got, the show could always come back to the grounding force of Rue and Jules’ connection. In each other, they seemed to find a way to make sense of a chaotic world. Jules helped Rue start a tumultuous sobriety journey, while Jules was elated because Rue accepted her for who she was. 

In those days, Euphoria often garnered comparisons to the controversial U.K. drama Skins. The parallels went deeper than the series’ frank depictions of teenage sex and drug use, or their eye for generational talent, or the fact that Skins was a major influence on the Israeli miniseries that formed the basis of Euphoria. Through Jules and Rue—the former a white transgender girl with a history of self-harm, the latter a Black lesbian dealing with a variety of mental disorders and an addiction to prescription medication—Euphoria continued Skins’ legacy of exploring complex queer dynamics. 

Jules offered a rare TV portrayal of a teenager struggling with her trans identity. At first glance, she comes across as part magical girl anime heroine, part Manic Pixie Dream Girl—a cool, eccentric young woman who captures the attention of the show’s main character and mostly exists to improve her life. Fortunately, Euphoria gave Jules dimensions beyond those archetypes, granting her the sort of rich inner life that’s still uncommon for trans characters on TV. Season one dug into her emotional backstory and her time in a psych ward as a child; in the Jules-centric 2021 special “Fuck Anyone Who’s Not A Sea Blob”—an indisputable series highlight—co-writers Schaefer and Levinson intricately explore Jules’ feelings for Rue, her parental trauma, and, crucially, how she’s coming to terms with her gender identity and herself. The special indicated that both creator and star had a clear understanding of who Jules is—her fears, desires, ambitions. It’s a travesty that, by the end of the series, none of it re-materializes. 

When season three picks up five years after the East Highlanders’ graduation, Jules has abandoned her art school dreams, opting to be the kept woman of a wealthy, married man with a severe affinity for BDSM. She hooks up with Rue, but the reunion doesn’t go smoothly. Their last scene together is an incomprehensible blend of intimate violence and physical comedy in which Jules slaps Rue so hard that it sends her careening into a work-in-progress painting, which collapses on top of her. Are we supposed to laugh, get angry, or feel bad for them? Euphoria doesn’t bother to sufficiently explain. 

The rest of Jules’ arc, including the penises she draws for the TV series Lexi works on, lacks any details about how her relationship to her gender and body dysmorphia has evolved since high school. The whole thing with the drawings turns into a bit that furthers Lexi’s career, not Jules’. And while she hardly has the opportunity to process the loss of Rue, Jules doesn’t even know that another of their classmates is dead: Nate (Jacob Elordi), with whom she also shared an intricate, unnerving bond. 

At least Rue’s death, gutting as it may be, offers a meaningful conclusion to her story, and to what Levinson’s provocative series has to say about addiction, recovery, and faith. Jules’ story, on the other hand, now feels as thin as that canvas that fell onto Rue—and with none of its artfully rendered details. Euphoria may have been mired in controversy since it began, but the show was at least gutsy and unapologetic about its neon-tinted approach to various coming-of-age experiences, especially one as unique as Jules’. By stunting Jules’ growth and sticking her in the background of season three, the series both diminishes some of its highest highs and wastes Schaefer’s talent. Euphoria made a reputation for itself by doing the most: It wasn’t enough for Nate to be buried alive by a loan shark and his goons—they also had to put a rattlesnake in the coffin with him. But by giving Schafer absolutely nothing to work with in the final season, the show consigned her character to a much more upsetting fate.

Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic. 

 
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