Angus Cloud, who played the slow-talking, big-hearted Fezco on Euphoria, died Monday. His family confirmed the news in a statement to Rolling Stone but did not announce a cause of death. He was 25.
“It is with the heaviest heart that we had to say goodbye to an incredible human today,” his family said in a statement. “As an artist, a friend, a brother and a son, Angus was special to all of us in so many ways.
“Last week he buried his father and intensely struggled with this loss,” the statement continued. “The only comfort we have is knowing Angus is now reunited with his dad, who was his best friend. Angus was open about his battle with mental health, and we hope that his passing can be a reminder to others that they are not alone and should not fight this on their own in silence.”
On Euphoria, Cloud played a sweet and protective drug dealer who looked out for Rue Bennett, the show’s main character, played by Zendaya. His unusual way of speaking and the way he looked out for his adopted little brother, Ashtray, and Rue, made him one of the series’ most beloved characters.
The actor, who was born Conor Angus Cloud Hickey to Irish parents in Oakland, California on July 10, 1998, had only started accruing acting credits in the past few years. He’d gone to the Oakland School for the Arts, which castmate Zendaya also attended, but didn’t study acting. He got his big break in 2018, a couple of years after he’d moved to Brooklyn on a whim, when a representative for Euphoria approached him out of the blue and asked him to audition. “I was confused and I didn’t want to give her my phone number,” he recalled in a GQ interview. “I thought it was a scam.”
Jennifer Venditti, the Euphoria casting scout who spotted Cloud, explained why she wanted to work with him in an interview with Variety. “He was not what you would expect,” she says. “He has this rough, street quality about him, but he’s a very sensitive and curious and open person. Just really warm, and incredible on camera. Very charming, and told incredible, funny stories. There was one question about something crazy you did, and he told this story about him and his friends breaking into a zoo. The way he told it was very funny. That’s a quality I look for in interviews. Some ability to tell a story that’s engaging.”
In a 2019 Paper interview, Cloud reflected jokingly on how fame had changed him: “I can’t do a lot of the shit that I loved doing before — hooligans, shenanigans, shit.” He also told a story about how he’d won a trip on a cruise before the show that he’d love to do again but realized after he got famous, “It wouldn’t be the same.”
Outside of Euphoria, he first appeared in a movie called North Hollywood, which came out in 2021. In subsequent years, he appeared in music videos for Juice Wrld’s “Cigarettes” and Becky G and Karol G’s “Mamiii.” He also appeared in the film The Line, which came out last month.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, he said he’d had an unusual experience with learning how to act. “I went over down to South Central or something like that, and Shia Labeouf, he was running an acting class for free out of this school’s stadium,” he recalled. “So I went over there to see what they were talking about.”
In the same interview, he also said that Zendaya was “my family now” but expressed shock when asked about how he felt about seeing himself on TV for the first time. “[The] first time I watched myself on TV I didn’t like it,” he said. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck, I suck at this. Why did they pay me to do that?’” Fans of Euphoria disagreed, however, and that opened him up to more acting gigs. Deadline reports that Universal had signed him on to appear in an as-yet-untitled thriller alongside Kathryn Newton and Will Catlett.
Ultimately, Cloud hoped people could understand that he wasn’t his character Fezco. “It does bother me when people are like, ‘It must be so easy: You get to go in and be yourself,’” he told Variety. “I’m like, ‘Why don’t you go and do that?’ It’s not that simple. I brought a lot to the character. You can believe what you want. It ain’t got nothing to do with me.”
This story is developing.
From Rolling Stone US
