Sydney Sweeney is seemingly saying goodbye to Euphoria season 3 much like her on-screen character, Cassie Howard — with a bang.
“It’s called… acting,” Sweeney, 28, wrote via Instagram on Sunday, May 31, alongside several behind-the-scenes and on-screen photos of the actress during what many believe to be the final season of the hit HBO series.
In one nearly-total nude photo, the actress can be seen posing with what fans will immediately recognize to be Alamo’s (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) snake at The Silver Slipper. In the topless pic, Sweeney expertly covered her nipples with leaf-life green pasties. She posed semi-nude with the (apparently real, yikes!) reptile with a matching leaf-line green pasty bottom to keep her covered between the legs.
Other photos featured Sweeney posing with her costars, including Alexa Demie, who plays Maddy Perez, and Jacob Elordi, who played Sweeney’s onscreen husband Nate Jacobs.
Sweeney has been making headlines for her season 3 performance, particularly when it comes to the compromising positions her character finds herself in after joining OnlyFans and quickly becoming an influential content creator-turned-sex worker.
During the May 24 penultimate episode, Cassie was unable to retrieve her newly-deleted OnlyFans account. In an attempt to regain the many online followers she lost, she hooks up with actor Dylan (Homer Gere). After the pair have sex, Cassie secretly uploads a selfie of the pair together to his social media account. The move, of course, reestablishes her as an online influencer, and within hours she has the thousands of subscribers necessary to reenter the OnlyFans world.
Sweeney has not only raised eyebrows for how many topless and near-nude scenes she’s shot for the season — her character’s arch as a whole has received much online criticism, with many real-life OnlyFans creators voicing their frustrations for how their line of work is being portrayed.
“[Cassie] has got her dog house and her little dog ears and the nose, and that has its own humor,” the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, explained to The Hollywood Reporter in April, defending the character’s storyline. “But what makes the scene is the fact that her housekeeper is the one filming it.”
He continued, “What we wanted to always find is the other layer of absurdity that we’re able to tie into it so that we’re not too inside of her fantasy or illusion. The gag is to jump out, to break the wall.”
Euphoria airs on HBO Sundays at 9 p.m. ET.
