Maude Apatow may be a child of Hollywood—the offspring of comedy superstars Judd Apatow and Leslie Mann, to be precise—but the 24-year-old is still getting used to Euphoria-levels of attention. “I can’t even really think about it, or else I get too nervous,” she says of the white-hot hullabaloo around the hit HBO teen drama: “It scares me.” (She’s not being coy: even a cross-country Zoom interview with L’OFFICIEL causes angst enough to warrant an 11th-hour change to a phone call.) If her star-making turn in the second season of the show is any indication, however, she’s going to have to get used to the idea of more screen time, stat.
It takes a lot to break out of an ensemble cast—especially a murderers’ row of Gen Z talent like Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, and Hunter Schafer. So when Apatow first appeared in season one of Sam Levinson’s HBO hit, her role (Lexi Howard, the bookish former best friend of Zendaya’s character, Rue) didn’t exactly make a splash amongst all of the drug and sex and digital-era-fueled mayhem for which the series is known. But in Euphoria’s sophomore effort, Apatow’s Lexi emerges with a character arc (involving a Shakespeare-style play-within-a-play, no less!) that pushes her to the front of the plot—and some of her castmates’ characters to the edge.
’s a little campy, sure, even without the off-Broadway-level stage production Lexi cooks up: a tumult of love triangles, substance abuse, full frontal male, its success as a show is less in accurately depicting late adolescence than accurately depicting the way late adolescence can seem while you’re in it. “In high school everything feels so dramatic and so important. If I look back at certain things I went through, it’s like, why did I even care about that? But it felt at the time like the most important thing in the world. And that’s how Sam writes Lexi,” Apatow says. “The stakes aren’t as high comparatively, but also they . She’s taking her stuff just as seriously as everyone else is theirs.”
