Jacob Elordi's run as the volatile Nate Jacobs ended in a coffin, literally. The HBO drama "Euphoria" killed off one of its most recognizable characters in Season 3, Episode 7, burying him alive and letting a rattlesnake finish the job. It was a brutal exit for a character who had defined the show's dark edge since its 2019 premiere, and it marks the end of a role that transformed a broke Australian actor into a household name.
Page Six reported the details of the death scene along with exclusive comments from Elordi's co-star Jack Topalian, who plays the gangster Naz. In the episode, Naz, owed roughly one million dollars by Nate, buries him in a coffin rigged with a narrow breathing pipe. The plan was to hold Nate underground for 72 hours while his wife Cassie, played by Sydney Sweeney, scrambled to raise the money. Instead, a rattlesnake slithered down the pipe and bit him. By the time Cassie and her best friend Maddy, played by Alexa Demie, found Nate, he was dead.
Naz didn't survive the episode either. A character named Alamo, played by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, fatally shot him.
Nate Jacobs was never meant to be liked. Across Seasons 1 and 2, the high school jock manipulated, threatened, and blackmailed the people around him. He choked his girlfriend Maddy. He pursued Cassie behind her back. His rage traced back to a childhood discovery of his father Cal's sex tapes, a trauma the show used to explain, though never excuse, the character's cruelty.
Season 3 changed the equation. Set five years after high school, the new season softened Nate in ways that left fans bewildered. His rage issues vanished. He appeared to genuinely love Cassie. He took over his father's construction business, only to see the work halted by an endangered flower, the white fritillary. Then he started conning people out of money for construction projects, which put him in debt to Naz.
Fans were not kind about the transformation. Many called it a "lobotomy," questioning why a character defined by volatility had been rewritten into something almost unrecognizable. Whether that shift was a deliberate creative choice by showrunner Sam Levinson or a symptom of the production's reported lack of full scripts remains an open question.
In the entertainment world, fan backlash has become a recurring theme, from actors drawing heat for off-screen remarks to audiences revolting over creative decisions they didn't ask for. The "Euphoria" audience, built on loyalty to specific character arcs, clearly felt shortchanged.
For all the fictional chaos, the real story behind the exit is simpler and more human. Jacob Elordi, now 28, was nearly out of the business before "Euphoria" came along. In a 2023 interview with GQ UK, the Australian actor described just how close he came to walking away.
"I wasn't booking jobs. I think I had, I don't know, $400 or $800 left in my bank account, and 'Euphoria' was my last audition before I went home for a little while to make some money and recuperate."
That audition changed his trajectory. "Euphoria" launched Elordi, Zendaya, and Sydney Sweeney into A-list status. Margot Robbie later suggested Elordi for the lead role in "Saltburn," his 2023 big-screen breakout, after watching his work on the HBO series. He told Variety that same year: "Euphoria changed my life."
The loss of a career-defining role is something any working actor understands. In entertainment, the exits that matter most are the ones that close a chapter, not unlike the recent passing of songwriter Don Schlitz, whose work with Kenny Rogers defined an era of its own.
In an "inside the episode" segment following the Season 3 death, Elordi called it a "bittersweet thing" and described the show as a "massive" part of "not just my career, but my life." He said he was "proud" to have been part of it.
He also offered a surprisingly generous view of the character most viewers loved to hate.
"It was a cool way to go. Nate is somebody who's made so many mistakes and so many dark choices."
In a separate interview with Entertainment Weekly, Elordi went further, saying he "loves" Nate even though most fans despise him.
"It's a real treat to be a part of that show, and to play the quote-unquote bad guy. It's always more fun. You don't wanna play some morally superior, world-saving loser."
That line alone tells you something about the actor's instincts. He understood that the villain makes the story move.
Elordi's commitment to the role wasn't just emotional. Co-star Jack Topalian, who played Naz, told Page Six exclusively that Elordi performed much of his own physical work in the brutal wedding night beating scene from Episode 3 of Season 3, the sequence where Naz interrupts the wedding, has Nate savagely beaten, and cuts off his toe.
"That's [Elordi] really doing the struggling and the fighting and the falling and all of that."
Topalian called Elordi "committed," "giving," and "prepared." But he also noted the actor's ability to snap out of the darkness between takes.
"Obviously, he gets back into character really quickly. But once [the director calls 'cut'] even though he's been beaten and abused, he's still having a lot of fun. He's still cracking jokes and doing things like that."
That professionalism extended to the creative process, though Season 3 apparently tested it. Elordi told Entertainment Weekly that he typically likes to "obsess over" his work and go through "every element and construct it and put it together." But for Season 3, he said there was "no time" and "no choice", full scripts were apparently unavailable, and preparation came through creative conversations with Levinson rather than the usual deep-dive process.
Whether that lack of preparation contributed to the uneven character arc fans complained about is a fair question. When actors don't have complete material to work with, even the best performers are flying partly on instinct. The audience can usually tell.
Nate Jacobs was the engine of conflict on "Euphoria." Without him, the show loses its most reliable source of tension. The character's death also underscores a broader pattern in prestige television: the impulse to kill off major characters for shock value, even when the storytelling hasn't fully earned the moment.
Fans who watched Nate go from a terrifying manipulator to a softer, almost domesticated husband, only to die in a coffin from a snakebite, have reason to feel that the character deserved a more coherent final arc. The "lobotomy" criticism isn't just about one season. It's about whether the people running the show respected the story they built.
The entertainment industry runs on audience trust. Break that trust often enough, and viewers stop showing up. It's a lesson that applies well beyond Hollywood, as fans of TLC's Chilli discovered when political conformity became the price of public approval.
Elordi, for his part, seems at peace with the ending. He told Entertainment Weekly that playing Nate taught him "a lot about empathy and patience, which is strange with a character like that." He described acting as a way "to understand a different experience, to express an experience that's different to my own."
That's a mature read from a 28-year-old who was nearly broke before his last audition. Whatever "Euphoria" becomes without Nate Jacobs, Jacob Elordi walks away with a career that didn't exist before the show, and a clear-eyed understanding of why the bad guy is usually the most interesting person in the room.
Hollywood loves to preach about complexity and moral ambiguity. Elordi actually played it. The audience noticed, even when the writers forgot what made the character work.
