HBO Max’s Euphoria is a starmaker—Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, and Jacob Elordi—so why did one of its biggest breakouts all but disappear from Hollywood?
Alexa Demie, who plays the sharp-tongued Maddy on Euphoria, was the show’s “It Girl” in its first season. But since then, Demie, 35, hasn’t landed any other meaningful parts.
“She wants to be a star, and the fact she isn’t as big as Sydney and Zendaya does bug her,” an inside source told the Daily Mail on Monday.
After Euphoria’s second season in 2022, which made the show the second-most-watched HBO series of all time behind Game of Thrones, Demie seemed poised for the spotlight alongside her cohort of future Emmy and Oscar nominees.
But the roles never came.
The actress admitted that she had been “ready to quit” acting after facing so many rejections.
“I got to the point where I was like, ‘I’m over this, and I kind of don’t even want to do this anymore,’” Demie said in a 2020 interview.
Demie argued that many of her would-be roles went to other actresses purely for their appearances.
“I wasn’t booking anything ever. Ever. It was really hard, especially because I feel like a lot of the lead roles I would go out for would go to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl,” Demie responded when asked why she wanted to quit.
“I just don’t think I would be typically looked at for a lead role. Like, you never see a mixed or a Latin girl as a lead,” she concluded. ”And I was over people saying ‘No’ to me.”
If stealing her onscreen boyfriend wasn’t enough, Sweeney, 28, has also been the subject of Demie’s ire for stealing her roles, too.
“People could tell there was no love lost between them. They definitely don’t like each other,” the inside source revealed after the premiere. “They aren’t friends, and they aren’t going to be.”
“Alexa and Sydney can co-exist in the same room if they have to, but they would avoid each other as much as possible on set,” the source continued.
Unlike her overtly popular character in Euphoria, Demie has described being “bullied” in high school, attributing it to her extreme introversion.
“I’m such a private person,’ Demie said in a 2019 interview with InStyle. “In high school especially, I was very introverted, and if I don’t know you, I can be really shy.”
In the past five years, Demie has booked just two roles, one as an uncredited “club girl” on Euphoria creator Sam Levinson’s shockingly bad The Idol and the other as a one-episode guest star on the little-seen HBO series Fantasmas.
Now, Demie is poised for a comeback, making a splash at the show’s big Los Angeles premiere event last week and sharing a photo of herself for the first time since 2023 with her 11 million Instagram followers. Still, no future roles have been announced.
Euphoria Season 3 premiered on April 12. Subsequent episodes premiere each Sunday on HBO Max.
