EUPHORIA Star Hunter Schafer Covers GQ’s ‘Creativity’ Issue

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In a new cover story for GQ’s ‘Creativity’ Issue, actor, model and activist Hunter Schafer speaks with GQ contributor Emma Carmichael about creative paths she’d like to pursue outside of acting. The gen-z icon also opens up about her dating life, and reflects on the loss of her friend and fellow EUPHORIA cast member Angus Cloud.

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On her career beyond acting: “I always kind of get into the spiral of, Am I meant to be doing this?” she says. “I think I could probably keep doing the acting thing for a while, just based on how shit’s been going, which is really cool. But there are so many other things that I want to do with my life that I kind of put on hold and I don’t want to let go of.”

She’d like to return to her art practice, for one, and have her own gallery show. She wants to start a fashion house, but not in a half-assed celebrity way; she’d want to go back to school for fashion design first, and learn how to tailor and sew. “I want to be on my Alexander McQueen shit,” she says. There is more acting to do too: She would like to do a rom-com, and maybe a musical—she has a singing credit on Cuckoo, and her go-to karaoke song is, rather intimidatingly, Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”—and to keep learning the bass.

Is that all? I ask. “No!” Schafer says. She wants to DJ a party too.

On the loss of her friend and fellow Euphoria cast member Angus Cloud: She is recovering in other ways too. Last summer, her beloved colleague and close friend Angus Cloud died from an accidental drug overdose, devastating the tight-knit Euphoria community. When it comes up during our lunch, Schafer starts crying, and I tread carefully, unsure if it’s something she wants to talk about publicly at all. She and Cloud, who played the laconic and protective drug dealer Fez, were the same age, and Euphoria was also his first acting role. In many ways they grew up together, both on and off the show. But Schafer says she feels ready to take a moment to honor him.

“I’ve never had a friend that I was that close to and that was my age pass before,” she says, wiping away tears. “It’s really surreal. It doesn’t make sense. And yeah, it’s new. It’s a new kind of grieving.

“It comes randomly,” she continues. “It will hit me when I’m on the fucking toilet. It’s really…I don’t know. Grief is fucking weird.”

But she wants people to know that her friend was special. “People really fell in love with Angus,” Schafer says. “He was really one of the heartbeats of Euphoria. It’s always the people that are just kind of a little too good for the world and a little too pure. He was a f*cking angel. He was sunshine.”

On filming her first lead role in a feature film—Tilman Singer’s psychological thriller Cuckoo–while recovering from a breakup: “Now that I’ve figured out the craft of acting and it’s not this terrifying thing that I feel like I’ve been thrown into, I get it,” Schafer says. “I can really find some levity and some joy in it.”

At the time, she was still recovering from a breakup with the actor and singer-songwriter Dominic Fike, whom she met while filming season two of Euphoria in 2021. “I had all these pent-up emotions,” Schafer says. As her Cuckoo character Gretchen, “I got to exorcise a lot of the breakup feelings that I was going through.” (The two reunited after she returned from Germany but called it off again last April.)

On her former relationship with Dominic Fike: Schafer had never dated a man before Fike and had thought she never would. “I had had so many shitty experiences with men before—not from dating them, but just in life,” Schafer says. “I think I had built up a wall that was way too thick around them.”

“And then I fell in love,” she says, smiling.

Being with Fike allowed Schafer to “work through a lot of the feelings of disdain that I had towards men as a whole,” she says. “I think it had inhibited a lot of my friendships with men, and a lot of that came down as well. I had a really beautiful relationship with [Fike], and it really opened me up in that way.”

It was also, Schafer says, her first time publicly dating another famous person, which made the breakup all that more exposed and painful. “I had dated other famous people before, but people didn’t know about it,” she clarifies. “It was completely different.”

Like who? I ask, and she shakes her head amiably. “People who care enough and have done their research probably know what’s up.”

[Photo Credit: Bryce Anderson/GQ Magazine]

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