Dominic Fike Drank Whiskey and Took Shrooms Before ‘Eupho…
Dominic Fike didn’t complete his first audition for Euphoria because he was “beyond fucked up.”
The musician and actor revealed how he ended up playing Elliot in Season 2 of the HBO cult show on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.
Fike said that when one of the show’s casting agents contacted his team, he “didn’t know what Euphoria was,” or that it was “this big fuckin’ TV show,” he told Shepard around the 1:05:15 hour mark.
Before his audition, the 29-year-old said that he read “about some actor who did his thing fucked up or something.” So, the night before his audition, he “stayed up all night with this girl, drinking whiskey, taking shrooms. I show up to the audition, or the read, beyond fucked up. I’m just laughing at Sam [Levinson], and everyone’s laughing at me because I’m just laughing at them.”
He not only arrived at the audition inebriated but 30 minutes late.
“They’re like, ‘Can you do this?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know, probably,’” Fike recalled. “We started reading it, but then the words started jumping around on the page. I was like, ‘I can’t do this script.’ And they were like, ‘Dom, just go get rest.’ And they were so mad at me. I remember they called my agents and were like, ‘This kid’s never doing anything in Hollywood again, ever. We’re so mad.’”
Euphoria’s casting agent reached out again the following year for an audition. By that time, Fike was “living in a different way” as he was “trying to buckle down” on his life.
“Sam had rewritten this character that I’d shown up to read, but he wrote it with the qualities of the guy who he saw show up,” Dominic explained. “He writes this guy that’s like, half his character and half the dude that showed up that day. And then I was honest with him. He has a meeting with me. He’s like, ‘OK, I know that you get fucked up, obviously. You have some problems. I have those problems too. We can get someone to help you, but you have to do this. You sign a five-year contract. It’s just a formality.’”
Fike remembered Levinson saying “‘I need to know that you’re not gonna fuck me on this.’ I was like, ‘Brother, I got you.’ At this time, I’m not understanding the stakes, still, of this show. I don’t know what this is.” But once he got on set to film season two, he added that “you find out real quick when you see that budget.”
Fike went on to make his acting debut during Season 2 of Euphoria in 2022. It was a tough role for him due to his personal struggles with substances, telling Zane Lowe in 2023 that being a “drug addict” on a show that was “mainly about drugs was very difficult.”
Back in 2022, Fike made the same confession about being high on shrooms and drunk during his audition in an interview with GQ.
“I started peaking right when me and Barbie were reading,” he said, explaining that he could barely read the script, and even imagined that Levinson was wearing a dress. “It was crazy. I started making fun of everybody in the room.”
Fike is slated to reprise his character in Season 3 of Euphoria, which is expected to debut in spring 2026.
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