Femme, Not Fatal.
A look at how Gen Z’s hottest teen drama portrays the victimhood beyond the bitchiness, exposing the emotional weight of looking powerful while feeling powerless.
Alexa Demie as Maddy Perez in Season 2, Episode 2, of Euphoria (2019), an HBO original series, directed by Sam Levinson and styled by Heidi Bivens. In this scene, Maddy is starting to feel the cracks in her relationship with Nate, sensing his emotional distance and wondering if he might be interested in someone else. This later unfolds into the Cassie betrayal arc. Courtesy of HBO Max. Available via CodigoNuevo. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
People love to call Maddy Perez from Euphoria a “femme fatale”, but I fear that pigeonholing her into that box just because she’s a beautiful, feminine woman, would be a disservice to her character and to the iconic femme fatales throughout history. On the surface, it tracks, she’s hot, sharp-tongued, and dressed to kill. She walks through East Highland like she owns the room, but the truth is, Maddy’s not a seductress plotting anyone’s downfall. She’s a teenage girl in survival mode, wearing confidence like armor and makeup like war paint.
What the show does is offer another version of a seductive woman that perhaps we hadn’t considered before. Through Maddy, the show takes an old Hollywood archetype and strips it down to its bones, revealing the very real vulnerability beneath all that glamor. It shows us that sometimes, instead of a villain, there’s a victim lying underneath. This is about what happens when a young girl is forced to perform power in order to protect herself in a world where beauty is both currency and curse.
Maddy’s aesthetic is textbook femme fatale: bodycon silhouettes, long acrylics, strappy heels, fur, gloss, eyeliner. She’s curated, theatrical, and magnetic. She’s the kind of girl who knows how to hold eye contact and end a conversation with a smirk and a wink. In old noir films, that look meant danger. A woman dressed like that was about to ruin a man’s life, but in Euphoria, Maddy’s aesthetic is more about survival than seduction. Her look isn’t a trap for men; it’s a shield from them.
She dresses like she’s untouchable because, in reality, she’s constantly being touched, emotionally, sexually, physically, without her full control. Her aesthetic performs power she doesn’t actually have: It’s only a costume for the role of the girl in charge.
The original femme fatale was dangerous because she had control over her body, over men, over the plot. Maddy has none of that, and her entire relationship with Nate Jacobs is proof. He’s emotionally abusive, physically violent, manipulative, and arrogantly good at twisting her sense of reality. One moment he’s possessive, the next he’s punishing her with silence, the next he’s on his knees begging for forgiveness. Maddy keeps going back because she’s caught in a cycle that teaches girls love is supposed to hurt.
Her so-called “power” is a performance, and Nate sees right through it. He knows how to break her down. He doesn’t fear her, he owns her. When her best friend Cassie betrays her by hooking up with Nate behind her back, Maddy’s mask cracks: she realizes she’s disposable. At home, things aren’t better. Her parents constantly fight and her father is an alcoholic. No one is really watching her. She’s been left to raise herself on survival instincts, constantly surrounded by people who feed into the idea that love is meant to hurt. If Maddy were a classic femme fatale, Nate would be the one bleeding. Instead, he’s the one pulling the strings.
Maddy is always performing, in the mirror, in her friendships, in love. The act holds for a while, but by the end, it starts to slip. What Euphoria does so well is leave room for that softness underneath her sharp edges. There’s no dramatic transformation, just a slow peeling back of everything she built to protect herself. And that’s what stays with you, the feeling that she never really wanted power. She just wanted to feel safe.
