Austin Abrams on Playing High School Age Roles: ‘I Can’t Really Do It Anymore’

Christian Blauvelt
·2 min read
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“Euphoria” star Austin Abrams believes his days of playing high school kids are behind him.

In an interview with IndieWire at the 2024 Sarasota Film Festival about his new fraternity hazing drama “The Line” from director Ethan Berger, Abrams, now 27, said that while he might still get some parts like that in “The Line” that place him in college, it’d be a stretch to see him playing a high schooler again.

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“I can’t really do it anymore,” he told IndieWire of playing such a younger character. “Yeah, definitely. It’s just like at this point, I’m not really a service to the project anymore. I mean, I just can’t do that. College, kind of. I don’t really feel like that. But yeah.”

While he broke out as a teenager on “Euphoria,” it’s been over two years since the second season of that show ended. Now no one knows when “Euphoria” might return, or if Abrams would even be a part of it (he played the boyfriend of Barbie Ferreira’s character, whose departure from the show was confirmed). Abrams didn’t mention it, but it’s assumed Season 3 could include a time jump to allow for the aging of the central actors.

The pandemic may have had something to do with Abrams transitioning out of high school roles. “The Line” was filmed in Oklahoma over just 17 days amid the Omicron wave of COVID-19. But because Oklahoma law required any actor who tested positive to quarantine for 10 days, if one were to catch the virus, they could be written out of the film entirely. Fortunately for Abrams and star Alex Wolff, they only got sick just after filming had wrapped.

“I think it was a day or two days after we finished, Alex and I both got COVID,” Abrams said. “Which we would have been totally screwed if that had happened while we were shooting. And Alex ended up staying there [in Oklahoma] for I feel like five days or something, at the hotel, because he was so sick. That was pretty gnarly.”

Abrams will next be in Apple Studios’ “Wolfs” from director Jon Watts, opposite George Clooney and Brad Pitt. And he plays a 20-something wandering musician in Mel Eslyn and Mark Duplass’s indie TV series “Penelope.”

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