Sydney Sweeney's Cassie Howard had one of the wildest character arcs in Euphoria's second season, offering up truly insane moments like her illicit bathroom hookup with her best friend's boyfriend Nate Jacobs (Jacob Elordi), her mascara-streaked meltdown in the girls' room ("I have never, ever been happier!"), and her smackdown with former BFF Maddy Perez during that shocking Season 2 ending.
But one of the character's most infamous scenes from the acclaimed teen drama is in the Euphoria Season 2 episode, "You Who Cannot See, Think of Those Who Can," when Cassie gets wasted at Maddy's 18th birthday party and projectile-vomits in a hot tub. Sweeney discussed the memorable gross-out moment during a January 25 appearance on First We Feast's Hot Ones.
After host Sean Evans asked the actress to explain the "mechanics of throwing up on camera," calling her work "one of the most realistic puking scenes on TV," Sweeney paused her hot wing-eating to reveal:
There's a lot of work that went behind that...Because Sam wanted, of course, it to just be projectile vomit everywhere, where a lot of films, they'll just have a cup of mushed-up anything that they have from crafty mixed with milk and water. It's the most disgusting thing and you just put it in your mouth, and you hold it and then you 'puke' it up, but Sam of course did not want that. He just wanted vomit everywhere, so they had to get a pump and they had this pipe that they just taped and hid on my body and then they CGI'd it out, up my neck. And then there was a horse bit that I had to put in my mouth and so, during that scene, they're filling my mouth with 'throw up' and then I open my mouth and it just starts shooting out of my mouth and it was the most disgusting thing I've ever experienced.
When Evans says that the cup method doesn't give simulated puke scenes the "realistic volume you need," Sweeney joked:
You need the pump. It's a very insane pump too but the horse bit, it was so, I was like, 'Why do I need the horse bit?!'
Even grosser, the actress—who can currently be seen in the middlingly reviewed rom-com Anyone but You opposite Glen Powell—previously revealed to British GQ that filming the vomit scene included her selecting the "flavor" of her own sick.
They were like, 'What flavour would you like it to be?”, and the only one that sounded appealing was ‘minty fresh. But when the minty fresh came out my mouth, I was like, 'What the f**k is this minty fresh?!'. I'm not sure what it was, but it was an experience!
Sweeney earned an Emmy nomination for her extraordinary work in Euphoria's second season but even she couldn't believe the places her character would have her going on the hit HBO series. As she told GQ:
I cannot believe that she’s turned into such a meme-able character. When I first read season two I reacted as the fans would, and then as time went on I started trying to understand the decisions she was making. Then I did get a little protective of her.
We don't yet know when we'll see Cassie Howard back onscreen—there's still no official premiere date set for Euphoria Season 3 but it'll likely be sometime in 2025.
In the meantime, you can look forward to Sydney Sweeney as Spider-Woman Julia Carpenter in the Marvel Comics-inspired Madame Web, set to release in theaters on February 14th. Hopefully for her sake, there won't be any vomit tubes or horse bits necessary!
