'Euphoria' Kills Off Nate Jacobs in Horrific Burial Scene

HBO's 'Euphoria' killed off one of its main characters in the seventh and penultimate episode of season three. Nate Jacobs, played by Jacob Elordi, is buried alive in a wooden coffin as revenge for his debt to Naz, a local businessman and mob-like figure played by Jack Topalian.

Nate's wife, Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney), has 72 hours to raise $1 million, or Nate dies underground of dehydration. Before she can succeed or fail, a rattlesnake slithers through the coffin's airhole. When Cassie digs her husband up, his body is purplish and bloated, the snake coiled around it. The final shot of his face reads like a horror film still.

Nate has been a central figure since the show's 2019 premiere. He arrived as a manipulative high-school athlete with wells of pent-up rage. In season one alone he choked his girlfriend and blackmailed a classmate. He also plotted to send an innocent man to prison. He got away with all of it.

Season three jumps the ensemble forward five years, into young adulthood. The showrunner, Sam Levinson, told Esquire that the audience's hunger for Nate's punishment was on his mind while he plotted the death.

"There's this kind of funny thing where I know what the audience wants in terms of justice or karma and with that in mind, I always think, 'Well, how can I give it to them?'" Levinson told Esquire. "How can I give them what they want, but make it so horrific and anxiety-inducing that by the time it happens, the audience isn't so sure they wanted it?"

He said he hoped viewers would feel complicit in Nate's suffering, which this season also involved multiple body parts being cut off in his conflict with Naz.

"It's like, 'Oh, you wanted him to get his comeuppance…? OK,'" he continued. "You end up going, 'Oh God, I don't know. Should he have had it better? Did he deserve it?' Those kinds of questions are always exciting to pose to the audience."