Barbie Ferreira on Leaving ‘Euphoria’: I Didn’t Want to Play the ‘Fat Best Friend’

Barbie Ferreira once again downplayed talk of major conflict between her and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson while discussing her exit from the hit series in a new interview on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast.

Ferreira left the show after its second season, during which her character, Kat, played a noticeably smaller part. There were also rumors of tension between her and Levinson, including a report that she walked off-set following a disagreement. Ferreira once again denied that allegation (“I did sprain my ankle once and had to get an X-ray, maybe that’s what they mean”) and described her decision to leave as a “mutual” one with Levinson, tied primarily to the problems of how to move forward with her character.

“I think that there were places she could go, I just don’t think it would’ve fit in the show,” Ferreira said. “I don’t know if it was going to do her justice. And I think both parties knew that. I really wanted to be able to not be the fat best friend. I don’t want to play that, I don’t think they wanted to either. I would’ve played her for as long as I was asked to, depending on what the material was.” 

Of Levinson, she added, “Sam writes for things that he relates to. I don’t think he relates to Kat. I relate to Kat.”

Ferreira said that her decision to leave was “freeing,” but added that it “obviously hurt” because she and Euphoria fans loved Kat. “It was a character I’ve never seen on TV before and I don’t know if we’ll ever get something like that, in that specific way, that was so edgy,” she said.

Elsewhere in the interview, Ferreira spoke about finding herself at the center of so much gossip around Euphoria and its allegedly toxic working conditions. (HBO has rebuffed those allegations. Levinson’s new show, The Idol, has also faced similar accusations, as Rolling Stone recently reported.) 

Ferreira said she could understand why people would be skeptical about Euphoria and what it might be like to work on it, saying, “It is a show about young women written by one singular man — that is the critique. But it’s also taken out on the girls themselves.”

She added, alluding to the walking-off-set claim, “It’s these real articles that will say, ‘Allegedly, Barbie did this…’ I’m like, ‘Allegedly, I did not do that.’ And to me, as a young actor, this is my first big job. I don’t want people to think I do that because I don’t. … I didn’t want to address it because it was almost like, if someone accuses you of something and you go say, ‘I didn’t do that,’ people are gonna start thinking you did it because they didn’t even know about it before.”

From Rolling Stone US.