We’ve only had a few days to mourn the unfortunate and untimely death of 25-year-old Angus Cloud, the actor who portrayed Fezco “Fez” O’Neill on the hit show Euphoria, and tributes are still pouring in. Last night, those tributes culminated in an emotional candlelight vigil in the star’s hometown.
A local artist named Darin Balaban painted a 9-foot mural in Oakland, Cloud’s old stomping grounds. TMZ reported that about 50 people showed up with candles, flowers and pictures of Cloud and placed them in front of the mural.
Others brought beer and played music and told stories. People were sad, but there was also a lot of smiles as they reminisced about the actor and his personality. We don’t know exactly how he died, but his mother reported it as an overdose.
“It is with the heaviest heart that we had to say goodbye to an incredible human today. As an artist, a friend, a brother and a son, Angus was special to all of us in so many ways,” his family said in a statement.
Cloud’s career was just getting off the ground, with Euphoria being his big break, having received rave reviews for his portrayal of Fez.
NPR recently spoke with Variety reporter Selome Hailu, about how quickly he found fame and how he dealt with it.
Cloud didn’t really see himself as a celebrity and didn’t change his lifestyle much besides what he had to do to go to work. So when I interviewed him for a profile that I wrote last summer, we talked a bit about that. He got recognized while we were together. And it kind of confused him when people would come up to him and say, are you from “Euphoria?” And he would always – it was a famous answer where he would say, no, I’m from Oakland. But I’m on the show, yeah…
He still has some unreleased roles coming in the future, like Freaky Tales and Your Lucky Day. He also had a role in the first movie in Universal Pictures’ new monster universe.
Hailu also said that she hoped his death can help people understand that fame can be a heavy burden to carry, especially when it happens so fast.
I think that him being on a show like “Euphoria” that deals so heavily and explicitly with things like drug abuse, coming from a creator like Sam Levinson, who has always been very open in discussing things like that, it was clearly a very heavy environment. And we had the tools to know and see that he wasn’t used to being viewed the way that he was.
Euphoria is currently streaming on Max.
