Euphoria Star Angus Cloud Got Cast in a Hit Show Without Really Trying

It’s a familiar Hollywood story by now: A normal person gets plucked from relative obscurity and hoisted into an unfamiliar social strata. It’s played out on the big screen in movies like My Fair Lady and The Jerk, but rarely does it happen so matter-of-factly in real life. And it may never have been handled with the nonchalance of Angus Cloud.

Cloud stars on HBO’s buzzy summer breakout hit, Euphoria, which follows a group of high schoolers doing drugs, having sex, filming it all, and blackmailing the hell out of each along the way. Over its short eight-episode stretch, Euphoria (which is executively produced by its stars’ fellow cool teen, Drake) has rapidly built a fervent fan base, becoming appointment viewing for the generation that aren’t just cord cutters, but the ones that never had any cords to begin with.

Playing Fez, a drug dealer with a heart of gold, Cloud has similarly amassed ardent supporters who would “literally murder for him,” according to Twitter. Amongst a stacked cast that includes former child actors, models-turned-performers, and the love interest from Netflix’s The Kissing Booth—all of which are led by Hollywood’s most sought after twenty-something, Zendaya—Cloud is unique. He is less so an actor by training, or even by desire, and more so one by complete chance, with Euphoria being his first ever credit.

Last year, the Oakland native was walking down a Manhattan street. He doesn’t exactly remember the street or why he was walking down it on that particular day or even why he was in Manhattan at all. The thing about Angus Cloud is that he isn’t big on the small details. He hits the major plot points but he’s not like his media trained peers that stash away delightful little anecdotes they can pull out when prying people like journalists ask them about auditioning, rehearsing, filming, eating, breathing, ad nauseam.

So Cloud was walking down that street when he was stopped by a pushy representative who said she worked for a casting company, asking him to come in to read for a new TV series. “I was confused and I didn’t want to give her my phone number,” he says. “I thought it was a scam.” But then, later, he later found himself in a nondescript room, filled with very serious people very seriously staring at him as he read lines from what would become Euphoria’s first episode. “I had to change it a little bit,” he says of the pages he was given. “To make it sound real, like how I would say it.”

Cloud was asked back to read again, this time with the pilot’s director, Augustine Frizzell. He had moved to New York on a whim nearly two years prior to that chance encounter after buying a one-way ticket to visit friends out east and then never bothering with a return flight. He started working in what he describes as a “chicken and waffle joint” and was living in Bushwick. But then, last summer, after acing his second reading, he found himself in the first class cabin on a flight out to Los Angeles to shoot the show’s pilot.

He says he quickly ruled out combing through YouTube acting tutorials, or reading up on the craft, before getting to the set. “I wasn’t trying to learn how to act on the plane over there,” he says. After all, if producers had cast him to act like himself, he thought, why would he try to learn how to act like anyone else? “Imma just show up and do what they want and then be done,” he remembers.

After Cloud wrapped the pilot, the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, called him to say that Euphoria had been picked up to series. He quickly moved to Los Angeles for the show’s eight-month shoot, staying in a series of AirBnBs near the Culver City lot where he was filming because Los Angeles landlords wouldn’t give him a lease. “Nobody was trying to rent me a spot,” he says, laughing. “I don’t have any credit and they didn’t believe I was a real actor.”

Realtors weren’t alone in their disbelief. Cloud couldn’t believe he was being paid to act, either. Though he’d attended the prestigious Oakland School for the Arts (the same performing arts institution attended by his Euphoria costar Zendaya before she jumped ship for a prosperous Disney Channel career), his focus was on technical theater. He spent high school building the sets and lighting the stage for the real actors.

Really, his first time in front of a camera was his introduction on the show, when Fez is established as the gas station-dwelling dealer to a teenage drug addict, Rue (Zendaya). “I was trying to look normal and relaxed and chill,” he says, remembering the experience. But on the inside, “I’m like, ‘I don’t know what I am doing. Why did they bring me over here for this? They should have gotten a real actor for this job.’”

His castmates' collective credits include The Handmaid’s Tale and The Walking Dead; they’ve worked with directors like Kathryn Bigelow and Ava DuVernay. They would talk about their performance process, some writing full journals from their character’s perspectives to better understand them. “I was like, whoa, that is some extra shit, but it’s actually the basic shit,” Cloud says.

In those first weeks, he was surprised by how exhausted he was at the end of the day. Was it more tiring than working in the chicken and waffles place? “It’s a different kind of hard. I am not running around sweating, but it’s that mental shit. You have to stay focused. You have to be on point. You can’t call in sick. Acting takes a lot out of you. I’d be drained, but I was just sitting there acting.”

And, while the acting didn’t get any easier, he started to understand the world around it a lot more. During down time on set, he would ride a bike around the studio lot, watching the filming of the other scenes he wasn’t in. Cloud was mesmerized by the amount of manpower behind the camera, everyone “jumpin around,” as he puts it. And, just when he had finally started to build a routine, it was over: “Then I realized I don’t have a job anymore. I was like, ‘Holy smokes! What am I going to do with my time?’”

Since wrapping production on Euphoria, Cloud has found himself at the top of Santa Monica pier’s ferris wheel more than the average Angeleno. (Which is to say, literally at all.) He’s opted to stay in the city, landing a real lease on an apartment in K-Town, filling his days with skateboarding around town, finding his bearings, and occasionally making his way to the city’s most western points, like the pier.

After he finished filming the show’s pilot— over a year ago, now— he was approached by managers hoping to represent him. Not really concerned with client lists, he settled on one with a thought process he describes simply: “I just felt like they were the realest ones. It was just about vibes.” His management has since set him up with acting classes, even sending him to a public class taught by the star of his favorite movie, Shia LaBeouf.

When the show premiered in Los Angeles earlier this summer, his parents and younger sisters joined him from Oakland. “It was a trip, with everyone flashing cameras and asking questions,” he says. Did he not like getting asked questions? “Nah. I’m not good at answering them.” Inside, at Hollywood’s famed Cinerama Dome, it was his first time watching himself on screen, let alone one that was 86 feet wide. He was surrounded by stars, critics, family. He sunk down into his theater seat, trying to get some distance from it all.

Toward the end of our interview, Cloud thumbs through a six-inch thick stack of photos that he pulls from a backpack covered in Hello Kitty logos that are inexplicably eating watermelons. The photos show moments of his friends back in New York and, sitting there in a blue and yellow striped Ralph Lauren polo shirt buttoned to the top, he laughs quietly to himself, spending a couple of seconds looking at each one. I had just asked him a question— it was about performance or establishing onscreen chemistry or something that likely came off as equally, annoyingly pretentious— but he appears to have forgotten I had said anything. Or maybe he just didn’t want to answer another question.

We had been at it for an hour and he was heading out of town after our conversation, catching a bus to Oakland. Cloud still says if he could live anywhere it would be back home. He goes back and forth between northern and southern California a lot; most recently, he headed back up for a birthday party with a few friends, renting out a “spot that we used to sneak in to.”

Actors and filmmakers can spend entire publicity tours talking about authenticity. It becomes a narrative on which whole award campaigns have been built and Oscars won. Hollywood seems to be on a never ending scavenger hunt for genuineness. And when, on the off chance they do locate it, they homogenize and merchandize it, breaking it down for parts so it can be easily packaged and sold in your nearest Target. But here it was, sitting in front of me, thumbing through photos and getting ready to hop on a bus out of town.

Euphoria, which aired the final episode of its first season last night, has already been renewed for a second season. As for Cloud, he has been auditioning quite a bit but hasn’t yet announced what’s next. “I’m down for whatever,” he says. Because for Cloud, acting may be a job—but it’s by far the best one he’s ever had.

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Originally Appeared on GQ