In January of 2020, the hit HBO series Euphoria held an open casting call for a trio of new Season 2 characters. One of them was Ami, who was described thusly: “Drug addict. Stripper. Hates her boyfriend. Talks shit. Can’t read a room. Can make a bad situation worse.” A number of people, including the rapper Azealia Banks, sent in taped auditions for the part. Little did they know that the show’s creator, Sam Levinson, already had someone in mind.
Adult actress Chloe Cherry was back home in Pennsylvania visiting her family when she received an email out of the blue asking her to audition for Euphoria. She was puzzled, but intrigued. With nobody around to help her read the sides, she FaceTimed a friend in L.A. to help her with her tape. After two virtual tries, Levinson asked her to fly out to L.A. for an in-person tryout.
“He was so excited about working with me and I was so shocked,” Cherry recalls. “The casting company said, ‘The creator really wants to audition you.’ So, I came in, and he said, ‘I thought you were really funny on Instagram and was hoping you’d be good.’ I’d always thought of myself as funny but didn’t know anyone was following on that level.”
Cherry read a scene about a prostitute dealing with her pimp. To prepare for the audition, she studied the ways people on heroin spoke in order to exaggerate her speech, but Levinson didn’t want that. “I just want you to say it the way you would say it,” he urged. She took his advice and landed the coveted role—now named Faye.
As Faye, the junkie prostitute with the full lips and unlikely roommate to Fezco (Angus Cloud) and Ashtray (Javon Walton), Cherry has exhibited a gift for delivering hilarious, spaced-out one-liners. A recent episode saw her turn to Cal, the show’s resident serial rapist, and mutter, “Do you and your son like… fuck people together?”
The 24-year-old credits her comedic timing to the hundreds of adult films she’s featured in, many of which have a comedic bent.
“I’ve always had good comedic timing [in adult],” she says. “A lot of my work’s been very funny, and I got so much acting experience. Can you imagine waking up in the morning, going to work, and then you learn what your character and lines are? Or finding out the day before? They’ll say, ‘This is your stepbrother and you’ve been mad at him forever. OK, action.’”
She pauses. “I’ve played so many different characters, too.”
One line Cherry’s particularly proud of occurred in the season premiere, when Faye and her boyfriend Custer (Tyler Chase) found themselves in a car on the way to a drug deal with Fezco, Ashtray, and Rue, played by Zendaya.
“Listen, I fuckin’ know what you are,” Faye, who is surprised to learn it’s New Year’s Eve, says to Rue. “You’re a fuckin’ junkie-ass bitch, and you’re probably fucking eating that ginger’s ass for fuckin’ oxys or whatever the fuck you’re into.” (Cherry improvised the “probably fucking eating that ginger’s ass for fuckin’ oxys” line.)
When filming on Euphoria’s second season commenced in March 2020, Cherry experienced a trial by fire. The very first scene they shot was the one from Episode 2 where, after apparently killing someone (her pimp?), a blood-spattered Faye is stuffed into a vent by a frantic Custer as the police close in.
“We just met and said, ‘Hey, how are you?’ and then shot the scene,” remembers Cherry of her on-screen boyfriend. “It probably would’ve been more comfortable had we had a little more time to know each other. Sam wanted to do the scene with me completely naked and Tyler was like, ‘That’s a lot,’ so they decided not to. But I was covered in fake blood and just felt so good being on set.”
Just when it seemed like Cherry had landed the role of her dreams, filming on Euphoria was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“A part of me was like, ‘I don’t even know if this is going to happen,’” she says. “I was ready to give it my all and then was so bummed. I also thought that with the change in political climate they might change the script or something.”
With porn filming on pause as well, Cherry—like many sex workers—relied on OnlyFans during the early part of the pandemic.
“When the pandemic hit and everything closed, I was so glad that I was already an established adult star,” she says. “I was able to have a platform right away on OnlyFans and didn’t have to build it, so I was able to do that so easily. I made way more money on OnlyFans than I did in the porn industry.”
And she’s confused why people are surprised that a porn star could land a role on a big show like Euphoria.
“We’re in 2022 and after a pandemic, is that really what we’re going to put our energy toward? This person was in porn so they can’t do this and that?” she says. “Look at how much people stream it. We’re never going to go back to a society where we don’t have porn. So, people shouldn’t be surprised that someone did porn. Porn is an art form in this world that people should respect.”
In 2015, an 18-year-old Cherry decided to enter the adult industry. She moved from Pennsylvania to Miami because she noticed that popular “amateur” porn sites like Reality Kings and TeamSkeet filmed down there, and felt she’d test the waters as an amateur in case she decided it wasn’t for her.
“I was always comfortable in my sexuality, loved feeling my sexual power, and loved turning people on,” she explains. “I was very comfortable in my body, and proud of my body. I just know who the fuck I am. And I love doing shit that makes people nervous.”
Cherry ended up being represented by Riley Reynolds and his Hussie Models—which had recently been the subject of the Netflix documentary Hot Girls Wanted. After some time in Miami, she decided to move to L.A. to start shooting on bigger productions but Reynolds, who has a history of allegedly exploiting amateur porn stars, tried to make things difficult for her.
“I kept asking him, ‘What do I owe you?’ ‘What do I owe you?’ and he wouldn’t answer. And then he waited until I signed with another agent in L.A. and said that I owed him all this money,” she remembers. “What are you, a twelve-year-old? It was really odd.”
Angus Cloud and Chloe Cherry in Euphoria
HBOThankfully, the matter was resolved, and Cherry soon became an in-demand adult actress in Los Angeles with a dedicated 500K+-strong Instagram following—Euphoria’s Sam Levinson among them. And, after a one-year hiatus, filming on Euphoria Season 2 resumed with Cherry back on set as the inimitable Faye.
I’m seated across from Cherry at a popular coffee spot in West Hollywood. Toward the end of our interview, a pair of girls—not a day over 20—interrupt our conversation to nervously ask her for a photo. They’re huge Euphoria fans, they say.
When she returns from the photo op, she’s beaming.
“That never happens!” she says. “That’s so fun.”
As for whether she’ll keep straddling the worlds of adult and Hollywood, Cherry isn’t quite sure. The next step for her will be finding an acting agent and booking more roles.
“I want to do any and all roles. This wasn’t an easy role, so I’m hoping that anytime there’s a weird, blonde person, people will try to hire me,” she offers. “It’s weird. Something came up in my life and now I’m going to follow it wherever it goes. I’ll always love the adult industry, but it’s not going to be my focus for a while. My main focus is definitely acting.”
A few days after our interview, a “celebrity sighting” of “Euphoria star Chloe Cherry posing for a photo with a couple of fans” at the coffee shop found its way onto the Instagram Story of Deuxmoi.
How to Stream Euphoria: HBOMax.
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