As Euphoria’s much-anticipated second season hits screens, we look back at our interview with Euphoria star Barbie Ferreira in Mission’s LGBTQIA+ issue.
Barbie Ferreira was sitting in her therapist’s office, fretting about a part she had recently tried out for, when she received the call that would change her life. As she was mid-conversation—and likely paying by the hour—she didn’t answer at first. After three missed calls, Karen (the therapist, whom she “loves”) insisted she did, and looked on as Ferreira was told that, after almost a dozen grueling auditions split between New York and LA, she had been cast in HBO’s forthcoming show Euphoria.
“It was the perfect time, because if it hadn’t gone that way, I would still have been in the perfect place to talk about it,” says Ferreira over the phone from LA on a Friday afternoon, three weeks into the coronavirus-induced lockdown. Much like most Millennials out there, Ferreira is spending self-isolation playing Animal Crossing and waiting for work to resume. Unlike most Millennials, however, that work is filming a hit television show. Euphoria’s second season, Ferreira tells me, was due to begin shooting the day after lockdown measures were initiated and is currently on hiatus.
Euphoria began its binge-worthy spin in June 2019 and swiftly became an international sensation that viscerally subverted what we have come to expect from an American teen drama. Although cheerleaders, jocks, and high-school cafeterias abound in it, so do explicit displays of drug addiction, rape, unwanted pregnancy and toxic masculinity. “Sam [Levinson, Euphoria’s creator] is a genius because he is paying attention to young people in a way that gives them a lot of respect, understanding, and empathy, instead of just portraying what he thinks a high-school experience is,” says Ferreira of the series’ writing, which is so authentic you would believe every line had been taken down verbatim. It’s been compared to the UK coming-of-age drama Skins, this time with the characters puffing on bedazzled vapes in lieu of Marlboro Lights.
The show gives a nuanced portrayal of sexuality and gender identity. It sees the transgender female character Jules (played by Hunter Schafer) injecting herself with hormones, and the tortured sexual exploration of Nate (Jacob Elordi) and his closeted father Cal (Eric Dane). Ferreira, who identifies as queer, salutes Euphoria’s deep dive into the LGBTQ+ experience. “We knew that it would be really special and would be something that wasn’t portrayed on television often,” she says. She reminisces about driving down Sunset Boulevard with Schafer during filming, imagining the day there would be a billboard of the show displayed and, “almost crying about it because it’s something we’re so proud of.”
Ferreira portrays Kat, a shy teen who uses the internet as a means of escape, writing One Direction and Once Upon a Time fan fiction for a sizable online audience. After losing her virginity at a house party and finding out a tape of the incident has been leaked online, Kat falls into a murkier part of the web and, through becoming a dominatrix-style cam girl, reclaims ownership of her sexuality. “I think Kat has never felt like she’s had any power, especially after having something as traumatic as a sex tape leak at the age of 16, 17. I can’t grasp how hard it would be to be in that position. I think a lot of it is a reaction to feeling like she’s out of control and like she’s lost control,” says Ferreira. In a more familiar teen-show trope, a wardrobe transformation ensues at the local mall, but in place of the usual stilettos and voluminous blow-dry are chokers, corsets, and harnesses. As Kat struts through the mall afterwards, her voiceover declares, “There’s nothing more powerful than a fat girl who doesn’t give a fuck.”
Ferreira’s own adolescence was not dissimilar to Kat’s. A self-professed “emo teen” who grew up in New York, she struggled to acclimate to her suburban New Jersey high school. “I was definitely the odd one out. I tried to fit in, I played field hockey and ran track, trying to be like, ‘I get you guys!’ It didn’t last very long.” Modeling became her escape route. When she turned 16, she began traveling into the city for castings and carved out her own life there. “When I started modeling, I was already growing out of high school. I already had my friends who were older or who were in college in New York,” she says.
The sound of Ferreira’s model-turned-actor career trajectory belies the hard work it took to achieve her dreams. Modeling was a stepping-stone she took due to her realistic comprehension of how often entertainment-industry success relies on familial connections. “The reason I modeled was acting, because I’ve been trying to be an actor my whole adolescence. But my family is not in showbiz by any means. I’m a first-generation Brazilian, and a lot of that stuff just wasn’t possible … I know how hard it is to get an acting role.” And it was through modeling that people got to know Ferreira’s name. “I wasn’t someone with no connections who showed up to an audition and [just] had to try their best. I mean, sometimes it works! But not all the time, not for me. I had to do something else.”
Over the phone, Ferreira comes off as an unapologetic grafter, a trait that, in the age of Instagram and reality-TV fame, you don’t often find in young Hollywood. “I just didn’t have that many resources growing up … It was just something that was a long time coming. I craved independence—I wanted a life that looked very different from the one I had, and I tried to manifest it,” she says. For her, landing a role in a hit show was anything but luck or happenstance—she had been sowing the “seeds” for a while. “It was all in the plan. I was dealt the cards I had, so I had to find any way to reach my goal.”
Despite her carefully curated path to stardom, at times speaking to Ferreira is like catching up with a friend who’s just hit the big time and can’t quite believe it. Her unrestrained excitement is refreshing. “It’s a whole new world out here, baby!” she exclaims. “It’s been a really crazy time. My life definitely changed, and now I have a whole new career, which is amazing.”
Ferreira spent last winter filming UNpregnant, a coming-of-age road-trip movie based on the novel of the same name by Jenni Hendriks and Ted Caplan. In it, Ferreira plays Bailey, the ex-best friend of Veronica (Haley Lu Richardson), whom she travels to New Mexico with to help obtain a legal abortion. Ferreira describes the film as a “wholesome, cute movie” that (like Euphoria) speaks to “a lot of what’s happening right now and what young people are facing.”
And in addition to filming her first movie, doing the Euphoria press tour, and navigating newfound fame, or what Ferreira modestly describes as “doing my thing and spreading my wings,” she has been made the first face of beauty enterprise Becca Cosmetics. “It was so hard, even as a plus-size model, to get into beauty. It didn’t matter if I was a model in general,” she says of the industry’s inclination toward (often damagingly) quixotic beauty standards. Her campaign with Becca aims to upend that tendency. “I don’t want to exclude people from the beauty industry … The primary consumers are people who don’t want to see fantasy, they want to see themselves.”
Ferreira is also all too aware—and grateful for—the shift in veneration her fame has brought. “I used to be a walking mannequin,” she candidly admits. “People trusted my creative side, but not in this way, where I have a say in things, which is very different from when I was modeling.” She is confident her input is warranted: “I have experience and I know what people want to see. I always think, what would 12-year-old me want to see, what would my friends who were 14 and just getting into makeup, what would they want to see?”
In case I didn’t already, when I hang up the phone, I know that what young people want (and need) to see is someone precisely like Barbie Ferreira. Although 2020 has thrown us a superfluity of apocalyptic curveballs, the actor has hope. “It’s going to be a very good year,” she says. And on the off-chance it’s not? No one can take that story away from her therapist.
@barbieferreira on Instagram
Images courtesy of HBO
