Euphoria Actress Nika King Reacts To Having Just One Line In Season 3 Episode

If you were surprised to see Nika King return to "Euphoria" in the HBO show's third (and hopefully final) season as Leslie Bennett, mother to Zendaya's central character Rue Bennett, imagine her shock when her character only got a single line.

I'll circle back to the context of the scene shortly, but first, let's turn our attention to a social media post King shared on Instagram. In the video, King, who's laughing, shares, "I just watched the episode that I've been promoting all week — and my mom over here is clowning me!" (In the background, you can clearly hear the actor's mother Sharon Allen laughing and saying, "Three years!")

King continued, "Y'all, I can't do nothing but laugh at this. When your mama clown[s] you. I don't know." Ultimately, as she put it, all she could do was laugh: "You better be glad I have a sense of humor. You better be glad I've got thick skin."

King previously joked about the extremely long wait between Season 2 and 3 in a stand-up set that went viral, where she "complained" (in jest!) about star Zendaya being at Paris Fashion Week instead of working on the series. So, what does King do and say with her one line in the sixth episode of Season 3, titled "Stand Still and See?" First, let's talk about where the show's five-year time jump catches up with Rue.

By the time we catch up with Zendaya's Rue Bennett in Season 3 of "Euphoria," she is ... not exactly thriving, to put it lightly. After years of struggling with an addiction to opioids and other deadly substances, Rue is a drug mule for the monotonal drug lord Laurie (a quietly terrifying Martha Kelly), who informs the young girl that she's on the hook for several million dollars during the season premiere. Rue, however, has other ideas and decides to ally herself with Alamo Brown (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), a strip-club owner. By the time we see Rue in "Stand Still and See," she's still working for Alamo, but she's also quietly working for the United States government as a mole.

That's how we get to the Nika King of it all. When she begins her tenure as a double agent, Rue is told, by the feds, that she just needs to call a contact in her phone "named" "Mom" in order to record Alamo and his associates. That's what makes it extra surprising when she goes into a church for a moment of solace and accepts a call from Mom, only for her and the audience to simultaneously discover that it is her actual mother. They have a genuinely touching conversation where Rue gets deeply vulnerable with her mom, and it probably would have been really nice to see more of King's performance on the other end of the line as Leslie. Sadly, it looks like King's incredible turn in "Stand Still Like the Hummingbird," the standout episode of "Euphoria" Season 2, was her real swan song on the series.

"Euphoria" debuts new episodes on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday nights at 9 P.M. EST.