Barbie Ferreira is setting the record straight.
During a recent appearance on The Viall Files podcast, the actress, 28, reflected on her role on Euphoria and explained how she knew it was time to exit the hit series after two seasons. After years of speculation about what went down behind the scenes, Ferreira revealed the less-than-dramatic truth.
“I think instead of me kind of lingering around for nine months, I think it was best for both of us that we just ended it there,” she said. “Of course it’s hard — I love Euphoria. I love Kat. Kat means the world to me. I mean, I spent so many years pouring everything into her, but it’s like, you don’t want to ruin a good thing.”
“It was a mutual decision,” she continued. “It was absolutely not just me. Everyone decided that … there was nowhere to go, and that’s hard obviously because I’m like, ‘What am I going to do?’ But again, with acting, things happen all the time and you just have to have thick skin and make the right decisions for you in your career.”
When it came to the rumors about why she left, Ferreira said she learned to tune out the noise. Still, that didn’t make it easy to hear.
“I was really young and it was tough,” she admitted. “Obviously there was a lot of discourse about it that wasn’t true, and I’m a person who just kind of lets everything happen. It’s a popular show, so people took it out of — I never walked off set. There was never anything like that. That was a whole thing, ‘She did all this,’ and I was like, ‘I absolutely never did that.’ You could ask the hundreds of people that were there every day. Fan theories are crazy, and most of the time they’re not right, but sometimes they are.”
Ferreira said that because of the online chatter, she chose to take a step back from putting herself out there on social media, saying “I can’t read it.”
“Respect to everyone who comments back and claps back and everything,” she laughed. “I have never been that girl. In fact, I just let it go into its own world and then fizzle out because what am I going to do? All I’m going to do is just fuel [it]. They’re not going to listen to me, they’re not going to believe me if I say something.”
She added: “When Euphoria came out, I was so used to being on the internet. I was always telling everyone everything I was doing, always talking to the camera, just always filling people in. And I think my biggest sacrifice as an actor is that I don’t use the internet for fun anymore. I mean obviously, I scroll through TikTok, but I don’t post a lot for fun most of the time. I just feel like it’s not the same being an actor who’s in a show that’s popular.”
Despite announcing her departure from the HBO show, which was renewed for a third season in 2022 but isn’t slated to release until 2026, Ferreira said that hasn’t stopped her from keeping in touch with her former Euphoria castmates.
“I saw Hunter [Schafer] the other day, I saw Maude [Apatow] the other day,” she shared. “Sydney [Sweeney] came to see my [Broadway] play [Cult of Love]. They’re all so busy. I mean, I’ve been out town for like eight months, so whenever we’re in town, we always try to see each other. And they came to support the play, which was really sweet.”
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Euphoria seasons 1 and 2 can be streamed on Max.
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