Remembering the Late Euphoria Actor

Was Cloud playing a version of himself? Does it matter? He was so good at acting that he could take a scenario we’ve seen countless times and play it so that it still surprised us.
Photo: HBO

Angus Cloud was one of the most distinctive actors on TV. He was surrounded by actors who had more on-camera experience and seemed to have put a great deal of thought into how to get audiences to accept the baroque sensibility and plot contrivances of Sam Levinson’s Euphoria, an R-rated troubled-teen melodrama that was shot on expressionistically lit soundstages and strove to feel like a dream (or nightmare). Cloud, who played the young drug dealer Fezco on the show, did not really seem “of” Euphoria. Yet somehow that made Fez its most believable and relatable character and made everyone else in a scene with him seem more real too. He just seemed to be, to react to everything around him without giving viewers the sense that he was obsessing over process and showing us his homework.

Incredibly, Cloud — who died at 25 after months of depression over his father’s death from mesothelioma — got the part through a stroke of good fortune: an HBO scout spotted him on a Brooklyn street, liked his look, and encouraged him to attend a casting call for the Euphoria pilot, which he booked. Cloud was working in a coffee shop at the time. There are many stories of people being plucked from obscurity and becoming stars. The best known is that of Lana Turner, who was supposedly discovered at the soda fountain of a Los Angeles pharmacy. Most of these stories turn out to be PR concoctions: With a little digging, you find out that the “unknown” actor was the son or daughter of a casting director or studio executive or Fortune 500 CEO or had been knocking around in theater or low-budget cinema for many years before their big break, honing their craft and making connections. But Cloud’s Cinderella story was the real deal. At the time of his death, his IMDB page had just nine acting credits in film and TV projects, three unreleased.

On paper, his Euphoria character is a “criminal with a heart of gold,” of a type that actors from James Cagney to Michael Kenneth Williams memorably played. Fez learned the trade from his grandmother (Kathrine Narducci of The Sopranos) and now cares for her as she lies bedridden from a seemingly terminal illness. Fez balances being a caretaker with running the family’s bodega (a front), negotiating with often terrifying suppliers, and being a half-older brother, half-surrogate dad to his pint-size but lethal sidekick, a Dickensian foundling nicknamed Ashtray (Javon “Wanna” Watson, another gifted discovery who got his first role on Euphoria).

Like the young Ray Liotta, he had striking blue eyes with long lashes that softened an otherwise stereotypically “hard” presentation: stubble, shaved head, gun, street clothes mismatched to suggest that Fez had good taste in individual items but not much interest in creating a “look.” Fez’s head was full of contradictory, unexpectedly deep thoughts that he couldn’t articulate because he didn’t have the language. He had to compartmentalize his trauma and other challenges because his existence didn’t offer much in the way of “me time.” He’d spent his young adult life risking imprisonment or death while trying to evade the authorities and appear neutral in disputes that could escalate. Cloud physicalized all of this by playing Fez as a guy whose default position was to figuratively and sometimes literally keep his head down (and his eyes averted) until he felt compelled to raise it, square his shoulders, and use his baby blues to comfort, judge, flirt, or intimidate.

To look or not to look: That was the question Fez mulled as Euphoria’s superheated subplots swirled around his life. Cloud’s eyes told the character’s story, whether Fez was coping with the motormouth addict Rue (Zendaya) as she pleaded for a hit, floated a scheme, or babbled nonsense; connecting with the teen playwright Lexi Alexander (Maude Apatow) at a party and being surprised by her sincerity; confronting the rich thug Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi), whose crimes had gone unpunished by the law; or talking sense to Nate’s tormented father, Cal (Eric Dane), who came to the bodega armed for payback. A season-one scene sees Fez carry on a full conversation with Rue at the same time that he’s giving Grandma a sponge bath. Notice how Cloud makes regular eye contact with Zendaya without regularly pausing his actions to speak or listen, making us believe that Fez has bathed grandma so many times that he can do it without looking. In a scene in the season-two premiere, which was built around Cloud and posthumously dedicated to his memory, Ashtray spontaneously uses a hammer to kill a drug supplier and his minion in Grandma’s living room, and Cloud performs Fez’s repeated “What the fucks” less with horror than a mix of irritation and exhaustion, like a parent who’s entered the family kitchen to discover a mess whose authorship will never be claimed.

Later in that episode, Fez confronts the sexually manipulative and abusive Nate at a party. Cloud lets the bass in his voice communicate the general inadvisability of messing with Fez, but it’s an altogether quiet and reserved performance — until it isn’t. Fez initially pays more attention to the drink he’s making than to the taller, brawnier Nate being his usual smug self. The focus on the drink turns out to be strategic. Fez meets Nate’s gaze whenever Nate tries to act tough, returning his gaze just long enough to acknowledge the subtext (I’m not scared of you, Fez), then glancing away quickly but in an easygoing way that says, I wouldn’t be threatened by you anyway, Nate, but it’s not that kind of conversation, so let’s both be cool. Then Nate, smirking, asks, “The last time we talked, didn’t you tell me that you wanted to kill me?” Fez briefly glances away, then gives Nate a neutral smile-with-eye-contact before responding, “Yeah, well, it’s a new year, playboy,” and raises his cup for a toast, which Nate returns. Then Fez smashes a bottle against Nate’s head and slams his face into the bar top.

Watching the scene again, you notice that Fez held the bottle he’d used to make the drink at thigh level the entire time Nate was trying to out-alpha him. That’s why Nate doesn’t think about the visibility and location of the bottle and what it might mean for his health until it’s too late. We viewers don’t think about the whereabouts of the bottle either, even though in any bar or party scene where men puff out their chests at each other, there’s a better than even chance that someone will use a bottle as a weapon. Cloud was so good at acting that he could take a scenario we’ve seen countless times and play it so that it still surprised us.

Some artists know things that can’t be taught. Cloud might’ve been one of them. He didn’t have a single credit before Euphoria. He didn’t go to Bristol Old Vic or Juilliard. He didn’t have famous-actor parents whom he grew up watching on set. But he had star wattage and authenticity and was better at acting for the camera than a lot of people who come into the business with a training and other advantages. I have no idea what advice or coaching Cloud received on set, but it’s obvious from the way he comports himself on camera that whatever it was, he absorbed it. Maybe somebody explained to Cloud that screen acting is a collaborative performance among the actor, the writer, the director, and the rest of the cast and crew and that if everyone involved is good at their jobs, and the actor understands the function and overall vibe of a scene, he doesn’t have to do heavy lifting or oversell anything: He can just sort of think or feel truthful things at appropriate moments, and the camera — still the only piece of technology that can perceive fluctuations in the spirit — will record the truth and transmit it to viewers. Then again, maybe nobody told him anything. Maybe he understood how to act for the camera from watching movies and thinking about them later. Or from observing plays as a teen; he went to a performing arts school but only ever worked behind the scenes of his theater department. Or maybe it was all as mysterious as Dick van Dyke being a marvelous dancer without having taken a single class. These things happen.

Was Cloud playing a version of himself? Does it matter? Any performer who can convincingly behave onscreen as if there isn’t a camera and a crew just beyond the frame line can be said to have given a good performance, whether that performance reminds us of their offscreen persona or not. Who but the actor can say which parts of a performance are drawn from the actor’s personality and experience? Cloud was coy about it. “It’s a whole different character — we just talk the same,” he told Glamour, a response that, in old-school, actors-on-acting tradition, plays as both cryptic and honest. It seems hard to believe that Fez wasn’t mainly based on Cloud—when the Glamour interviewer asked him to reveal the most romantic thing that had happened to him, he replied, “Maybe getting a flower or some shit,” which sounds like a Fez line.

But whatever he was doing, it was perfect. Cloud had the gift of letting us perceive Fez’s mental calculations and emotional struggles even as we believed he was hiding them from other characters. This, plus Cloud’s regular-guy body language and voice, transformed Fez from a writer’s construct into a working-class antihero, at once life-size and iconic, like an early Marlon Brando character or the vulnerable brutes Ben Foster plays in modern crime thrillers. Cloud’s Euphoria scenes strung-end-to-end might equal three episodes’ worth of run time. Yet in the memory, it feels as if he was in all of it. You didn’t just watch him. You felt him.