Everyone’s favorite teen delinquents on HBO’s Euphoria finally returned to TV screens earlier this month, breaking ratings records for the network. But one of the show’s central figures was noticeably missing from the hotly anticipated second season: Chris McKay.
Played by actor Algee Smith, McKay is the lone elder friend of the group, having graduated from their dysfunctional high school and leaving its troubled, revenge-prone, pill-popping, and bejeweled teens behind for what he believed to be the greener pastures of college.
Fans had rooted for McKay, who seemed to be the only male character to view Cassie Howard (Sydney Sweeney) as a human being, unlike his friends who would routinely demean Cassie and exploit her, passing around her nudes and their homemade sex tapes after breakups.
In spite of McKay’s best intentions, their relationship was strained by his discomfort with how men objectify Cassie, unfairly lashing out at her for how she dresses. He even sometimes ran afoul himself by using Cassie the same way her past boyfriends had. Internally, he’s also struggling with the realization that he’ll be a mediocre college football player, despite his high school star status, leaving him at a difficult crossroads.
McKay thus falls back into the classic lost-graduate trope, lingering among his former classmates while trying to bury his emotions, and looking to Cassie for solace. But even that is shattered when hooded fraternity members burst into his dorm room while he’s in the middle of hooking up with Cassie, shoving him to the ground and roughing him up while he lays naked and helpless on the floor in a harrowing depiction of university hazing.
By the end of the season, the couple’s relationship seems irrevocably broken after Cassie learns she’s pregnant and ultimately decides to have an abortion.
But instead of picking up where Season 1 left off, addressing how McKay was dealing with the abortion, as well his emasculation and humiliation at the hands of his future fraternity brothers, McKay’s appearances are sparse in Season 2.
Out of the seven episodes that HBO has provided to the press for the eight-episode season, McKay is really only seen once, attending the group’s extremely messy New Year’s Eve party during its season premiere. In a hurried scene, McKay takes Cassie aside to ask if there’s any chance of reviving their doomed relationship.
Cassie confirms they are done for good and that he shouldn’t expect much out of her because maybe she’s not “a good person,” withholding that she was nearly caught mid-sex in a bathroom with McKay’s best friend Nate (who also happens to be her own BFF Maddy’s on-off boyfriend). And McKay, after emerging from their breakup talk, has to further endure Nate menacingly breathing down his neck as he tries to coax him into spilling private details about his and Cassie’s sex life.
Beyond those moments, McKay is essentially a ghost for the rest of the season, failing to reappear in any significant context.
Where to Stream Euphoria: HBO Max
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Smith admits that he’s just as much in the dark as fans as to what’s going on with McKay’s storyline, revealing that he and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson never discussed where his character was going nor the reasoning for his overall absence from the season.
“I’m not even really sure, to be honest with you,” Smith says of where McKay’s direction is heading. “I think that’s a question we have to ask our creator [Levinson], where he sees it going. We haven’t even gotten that far in the conversation, him and myself, on this, actually.”
It’s an unexpected creative decision, considering that McKay was a series regular whose life was deeply intertwined with some of the returning leads. And for a show that has prided itself on being inclusive and diverse in order to provide a more accurate picture of Gen Z adolescence, diminishing the storyline of the group’s only Black male friend makes the move that much stranger.
There was definitely room to expand upon McKay’s storyline as well, since it was never determined what exactly happened that night when McKay was hazed by his fellow fraternity brothers. (While many speculated that McKay was sexually assaulted—which has occurred numerous times as part of hazing rituals—Smith says that based on his script, there was nothing that indicated to him that McKay was assaulted, pinning the assumption on the editing.)
The 27-year-old, who this week was nominated for a NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor for his role in Judas and the Black Messiah, agrees there’s more ground to explore with McKay, who never really got closure with Cassie, or even as a character. There’s also now new ground to cover following that season premiere, where McKay could finally stand up to Nate, who has long pushed him around and is now engaged in a toxic love affair with his ex.
“That’d be a good breaking point for him to just walk away, go focus on how to better [himself],” Smith says, believing Nate’s tryst with Cassie could serve as the final push that McKay needs to let go of his high school glory days and his self-destructive friends in order to look to the future and confront his own feelings of inadequacy.
“Or it may not be the case, he may act of out of rage,” Smith adds, alluding to McKay heeding his father’s advice of bottling up his emotions and only allowing them to snap to the surface on the football field—the only place he deemed it appropriate for a Black man to showcase his anger and frustrations with the world without it negatively impacting him.
There have been rumors floating around online that the real reason why McKay’s storyline was drastically diminished for Season 2 was because Smith is unvaccinated. Smith says he complied with the production’s rigorous COVID-19 testing protocols, which was required multiple times a week even when he wasn’t on set, as well as day-off testing.
He also says that his unvaccinated status was never brought up or even alluded to during production, where he was on set over the summer, shooting hoops alongside co-star Angus Cloud, who plays Fezco.
In a statement provided to The Daily Beast, HBO denied that Smith’s vaccination status had anything to do with his limited screen time. “McKay’s storyline was written before the COVID-19 pandemic. To suggest otherwise would be incorrect,” the statement said.
However, HBO did not offer comment on why McKay’s storyline seemed to be left hanging and put on the back-burner for Season 2. Nor did it respond to questions on whether HBO made any policy regarding mandatory vaccinations for Euphoria or its other productions.
Smith just hopes that McKay’s storyline will be revisited in Season 3. “We’ll have to see, I’m just riding with the wave right now,” he adds.
In the meantime, Smith says he’s focusing on other projects, including an upcoming Japanese horror film, and has plans to release new music. His latest film, Hulu’s Mother/Android where he starred alongside Chloë Grace Moretz, premiered in December.
“Euphoria broke records for HBO for the season premiere, so I’m just excited to be a part of that. It’s just weathering it out and seeing how it works out for next season. If it does, we’ll figure that out. And if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t.”
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