Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for Euphoria Season 3.
Euphoria Season 3 has been a lot. Four episodes in, Rue (Zendaya) is a federal informant playing poker with the cartel-adjacent strip club magnate she’s recording for the DEA, having graduated from drug addict to drug mule to snitch in roughly the time it took Nate (Jacob Elordi) to marry Cassie (Sydney Sweeney), lose a toe after their reception, and leave her with a million dollars of his debt. Kingpins, cartels, cockatoo funerals. Sam Levinson really has thrown everything and the stove pot at the wall. Even stranger is that the moment audiences can’t stop talking about from Euphoria‘s newest episode involves none of those people.
Who Is Kitty in ‘Euphoria’ Season 3?
Kitty (Anna Van Patten) is a dancer at the Silver Slipper, the strip club owned by Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) that’s become one of Season 3’s central locations. She’s young, soft-spoken, and presents herself as exactly the kind of girl you’d be scared to ask too many questions about. When Rue ends up at the club while working her way deeper into Alamo’s drug operation, she clocks Kitty as Angel’s (Priscilla Delgado) replacement, just another body to shove up on stage while her boss makes his real money slinging pills and fencing guns. She has no agenda, backstory, or allegiance in the Laurie-versus-Alamo Cold War that’s quietly escalating around her, and she gets maybe three minutes of screentime, total, but it’s enough to change the direction of the show in a way fans didn’t see coming.
Euphoria’s Biggest Flirt, Most Likely to Laugh Mid-take and Active in the Group Chat | Superlatives
For it’s third (and possibly final???) season, Euphoria went all out. Chloe Cherry and Martha Kelly give us the scoop on behind the scenes goofs, who tried to get whose number and what award Chloe would give to herself.
Rue and Kitty’s one actual scene together happens in a bathroom, in which Rue pulls Kitty aside, gently, and asks if she’s okay, if anyone is making her do this, and if she needs help. It’s a small moment of human decency from a character who has not been dispensing much of that this season, and it comes after Rue witnesses the poor girl being used by a room full of middle-aged men who seem to be reliving their frat days by getting high and cheering each other on in the backroom of a strip joint. Kitty’s response to Rue’s concern is chilling, hidden behind a breezy brush-off and smeared eye glitter: “I just like to dance.”
What Does Kitty’s ‘Euphoria’ Season 3 Scene With Rue Actually Mean?
The easy read is that Kitty is being exploited and either can’t or won’t admit it. The more interesting takeaway is that it doesn’t matter which one is true, because Rue can’t do anything about it either way. Rue has spent Euphoria Season 3 operating under the logic that she can move through Alamo’s world without becoming complicit in it, that she can be the cartel’s errand runner, the DEA’s informant, and still be the person who checks on the girl in the bathroom. Kitty’s experience shatters that fantasy in about ten seconds. Whether Kitty genuinely likes to dance or has simply learned to say so, Rue is still standing in a strip club owned by a man running a drug operation, and she put herself there. The moment she walks out of that bathroom and back to work, she’s made her choice.
It’s also worth noting what the show is doing by cutting Kitty’s story in between shots of Cassie’s influencer party adventure. Cassie spends Episode 4 snorting top-shelf cocaine in a mansion, strategically letting a 22-million-follower influencer think something might happen before Maddy (Alexa Demie) swoops in with a camera. She monetizes the possibility of sex without her body ever being in any real danger. Kitty, meanwhile, ends up in a champagne room with four men and no one to save her. That gap between glamorized and unglamorous sex work, between who gets to make money on her own terms and who doesn’t, is exactly what Rue’s trying to correct when she corners Kitty later on.
Who Plays Kitty in ‘Euphoria’ Season 3?
Kitty is played by Anna Van Patten, and yes, if she looks familiar, there’s a reason for that. Anna is the younger sister of Grace Van Patten, who leads Hulu’s Tell Me Lies as the self-destructive, sometimes downright unhinged Lucy Albright. The resemblance is striking enough that fans spent most of Episode 4’s runtime wondering if the more well-known sibling had snuck in a guest spot on the HBO series before Google corrected them. Anna Van Patten is earlier in her career than her sister but has been building a resume that includes her sibling’s Amanda Knox drama, plus a 2022 horror movie with Regina Hall. The girls’ father is Tim Van Patten, a veteran TV director whose credits include The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones. So yes, the nepo baby discourse is getting fed this week.
In terms of Kitty’s potential future on Euphoria, nothing has been confirmed, but Episode 4’s title, “Kitty Likes to Dance,” doesn’t feel like an accident. Euphoria doesn’t name episodes after characters who are going to disappear. Given that Rue is now a DEA informant being asked to gather intelligence on Alamo’s operation, and that the Silver Slipper is squarely inside that operation, the two will almost certainly cross paths again. The more pressing question is what Rue does with that. She couldn’t save Kitty in the bathroom, but whether she tries again will say a lot about where Season 3, and her character, is actually going.
- Release Date
-
2019 – 2026-00-00
- Network
-
HBO
- Showrunner
-
Sam Levinson
- Directors
-
Jennifer Morrison, Augustine Frizzell
