The Boundless Soul of Angus Cloud
"You want some... Pepto Bismol or something?"
It's one of Euphoria's hardest-to-watch scenes, which is saying something: Rue (Zendaya), suffering from drug withdrawal, stumbles to the front door of her drug dealer: Fez (Angus Cloud). It's a scene that would've been unfathomably different in the hands of any other pair of actors on this planet. Another actor, as Fez, might've played it tough—maybe the man screams at the intruder, pushes her out the door. Not Cloud. He embodied the man—in what could've been a degenerate stereotype, ripped from a bad Law and Order episode—with a deceiving amount of worldliness. His gaze, lax and unblinking, betrayed the life he's lived, or rather survived through, the excruciating details of which we'd learned a few episodes prior.
But in this moment, with Rue spiraling, Fez welcomes her in—knowing exactly what's going on, but certainly not letting her know that what he knows. "I need somethin'," Rue tells Fez. "Can't help you," Fez says, even though he's doing exactly that, by letting her inside, "I don't have nothin' here." Eventually, Rue limps to the bathroom (cue the Pepto Bismol line), then over to the room where Fez's sick grandmother lives. Rue parses through the small pharmacy's worth of drugs on her bedside table. Fez walks in behind her—knowing full well this would happen from the moment he opened his door—and with a preternatural level of resignation and empathy, clasps his arms around Rue in a bear hug, and takes her outside. In that moment—after being the one who fueled Rue's addiction in the first place Fez does the only thing he can do to make amends.
Cloud, who hailed from Oakland, California, died at 25 year old Monday morning. TMZ first reported the news of a 9-1-1 call made by Cloud's mother. He was pronounced dead on the scene, and the Oakland Police Department is currently investigating his cause of death. "It is with the heaviest heart that we had to say goodbye to an incredible human today," Cloud’s family told TMZ. "As an artist, a friend, a brother and a son, Angus was special to all of us in so many ways. Last week he buried his father and intensely struggled with this loss. The only comfort we have is knowing Angus is now reunited with his dad, who was his best friend. Angus was open about his battle with mental health and we hope that his passing can be a reminder to others that they are not alone and should not fight this on their own in silence."
Cloud's lightning-strike road to Euphoria has been well-documented: he was strolling down a Brooklyn street when Eléonore Hendricks—a casting scout for Euphoria—stopped him, swapped contact info, and invited him to audition. In 2019, along with just about every one of Euphoria's featured players, Cloud was an instant standout. Over the next few years, he'd star in music videos for Noah Cyrus, Juice WRLD, and more, along with roles in projects such as The Line and North Hollywood. Though he hasn't started production on Euphoria Season Three, Variety reports that he recently finished filming a monster thriller for Universal. "It does bother me," Cloud told the outlet last year, referring to critics of his plucked-from-the-street-and-into-HBO origin story, "when people are like, 'It must be so easy! You get to go in and be yourself.' I’m like, 'Why don’t you go and do that?' It’s not that simple. I brought a lot to the character. You can believe what you want. It ain’t got nothing to do with me."
Cloud is right. His performance in Euphoria, which will likely stand as his legacy to those who didn't know him personally, was anything but simple. By skewing against Euphoria creator Sam Levinson's grand, hyperbolic dream world—offering a relaxed, yet deliberate, knowing performance—Cloud more than held his own amidst a crew of Hollywood's next-in-line stars: Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, and Maude Apatow. On set, he seemingly never postured, commanding respect through humility. Just being himself. When I interviewed Cloud's co-star, Javon Walton (who plays Fez's younger brother, Ashtray), he said his on-screen older brother would try to steal a golf cart from set every day. "If he finds something entertaining, man, he'll go with it, just keep trying," Walton said. "He was sitting in that thing for hours every single day, trying to get that thing going. Because the keys weren't even in there."
But in interviews, Cloud communicated indifference, as if he didn't care that he was trading blows in the same ring with a future Emmy winner. "I didn’t spend my whole life trying to be an actor, so I’m not finna be devastated if I didn’t do a good job on some shit where I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing," he said in the Variety interview.
Yet every move he made in Euphoria defied this. Especially when Fez opened his heart—which was long shelved in favor of survival—for Apatow's Lexi. In an early Season Two episode, two souls together on a shitty couch, Fez's gaze softens. He grows meek, hardly able to make eye contact with Lexi. "I just wanna tell you that talking to you was one of the best parts of my whole year," he says.
Every word, every small wisdom, all true. Angus Cloud gave a shit.
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