The expression in her eyes, when she’s not pondering some wisdom Ali is sharing, is one of surrender. She talks slowly and sometimes can’t muster more than a mumble or whisper. Her eyelids, devoid, like the rest of her face, of all makeup, frequently droop. A key part of that is the exhaustion that radiates off of her, off of Rue. There is also something definitively “end of 2020” about what Zendaya captures in this performance. But there isn’t a moment in this episode where Zendaya seems anything less than fully dialed-in and truly listening to what Ali says, without being fussy or showy about the fact that she’s listening. She has an incredibly gifted scene partner in Domingo and the flow between them is seamless, which helps. We’ve all heard that great acting is about reacting, and Zendaya’s work proves that here, too. Because of Zendaya’s expressions, the vessel through which Rue says what she says, becomes just as important, and even more telling, than the words she actually speaks. At various points during the conversation, that same mouth puckers, curls into a smirk, and frowns so fully that Zendaya’s mouth forms a perfect upside down U, turning her face into a mirror of the “worst possible pain” image on a medical assessment chart. Right after she says this, her lower lip completely swallows her upper one, as if she’s trying to button her mouth shut and prevent it from letting such admissions slip. “I wasn’t really trying not to relapse,” Rue admits. She’s not fidgety - Rue doesn’t have enough energy to fidget. In the beginning of the episode, when Rue tries to convince Ali that she’s doing fine, everything that’s happening on Zendaya’s face speaks to the battle that Rue is fighting within herself. It calls for raw performances from both of its main actors, but maybe especially from recent Emmy winner Zendaya, who must do the opposite of what she did at the end of that finale: be physically still while simultaneously conveying and containing the pain that put Rue, still a little wasted, in front of a plate of pancakes, in a mostly empty diner, on the night before Christmas. This one-off Euphoria Christmas special, which will be followed by another stand-alone installment (release date still TBA), is a bottle episode and the most stripped-down the show has ever been in its young life. Aside from a brief fantasy sequence in which Rue is living some happy, normal life with Jules (Hunter Schafer), she spends the entire episode in conversation with her sponsor Ali (Colman Domingo) in a diner on Christmas Eve. In the Euphoria special episode that aired Sunday night on HBO, Rue’s glitter has been wiped away completely, even though she’s still wearing the burgundy hoodie she had on in her music-video version of rock bottom. Because Euphoria is Euphoria, that relapse, which closed the season-one finale, assumed the form of a gritty Beyoncé video, with Rue, eyelids all aglitter, floating through a choreographed routine alongside a crew of similarly dressed dancers who supported her physically as she spiritually disconnected. The last time we saw Zendaya as Rue on Euphoria, she was in the middle of a drug relapse. The one-off Euphoria special wipes away the glitter of the season-one finale for an unfussy episode that highlights the nuance of Zendaya’s performance as Rue.
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