Some new cast members for Euphoria‘s second season have been announced.
The Hollywood Reporter states that Minka Kelly, Dominic Fike and Demetrius “Lil Meech” Flenory Jr. are coming aboard to act alongside returning cast members including Zendaya, Storm Reid and Algee Smith. This is the first major acting role for musician and singer-songwriter Fike. Flenory is set to play his father, Big Meech, in Starz’s upcoming series BMF.
There aren’t many details about the new Euphoria characters, but The Hollywood Reporter wrote that Kelly is rumored to play “a jaded, drugged-out suburban housewife.” Flenory will play the love interest for Alexa Demie’s character Maddy. No word on who Fike’s character is.
However, it could be that Fike or Flenory’s characters is the one Kelvin Harrison Jr. had to drop due to a scheduling conflict this past May. As Shadow And Act wrote in 2020 that Harrison had confirmed he would be joining the cast in the second season. As he told Shadow And Act’s Trey Mangum in the Opening Act podcast in May, he was excited to work with Euphoria’s creator Sam Levinson as well as Zendaya, Algee Smith and the rest of the cast.
“I really love the world. I love the way Sam Levinson [Euphoria‘s creator and showrunner] articulates the experiences of young people and mental health, and how he embraces individuality,” he said in May. “I just love the dialogue around the show, [and as] a person of color that happens to be African American, and to enter the space alongside Zendaya and Hunter Schaffer, and Barbie [Ferreria] and Alexa [Demie], etc. really excites me. And to be a male, a Black man as well, it’s exciting to me. [Seeing] how we can explore some of these same ideas and concepts and how we fit into this, into that world, has been exciting.”
“I know Algee [Smith] is on the show and I’m just [excited] to that narrative. So, it’s been really wonderful,” he continued at the time. “Sam is a great collaborator and we’ve had a lot of beautiful conversations about what we want to do with the character and what we see and how we feel. And he’s just very playful and it feels proper. [This is what] proper art is supposed to be like when you’re in this phase of it. And the pandemic has only given us more time to really sink our teeth into it, to make sure that it’s actually provocative.”
The projects that might have forced Harrison to drop out of Euphoria could have been one of three films–Cyrano, which has finished filming and is due out this year, Baz Lurhmann’s Untitled Elvis Presley Project in which Harrison will play B.B. King, or Chevalier de Saint-Georges, the biopic of the little-known Black French aristocrat and member of the French Royal Court of the 18th century. Harrison is slated to play the title character. The Elvis Presley film is currently filming, with a 2022 expected due date; Chevalier de Saint-Georges is currently in pre-production with no release date as of yet.
