Jacob Elordi locked in a coffin with a snake for two days while filming the final season of Euphoria, and apparently came away less traumatized by the reptile than by a sink full of old dishwater. Actors do have range.
The 29-year-old actor talked through the ordeal on the July 20 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where his Euphoria costar Colman Domingo was serving as guest host. The story centered on the grim ending written for Elordi’s character, Nate Jacobs, whose final moments involved being buried alive and bitten by a rattlesnake.
Why Jacob Elordi says Sam Levinson brought him back
Elordi described creator Sam Levinson’s plans for Nate with the kind of dry acceptance that suggests he knew exactly what show he had signed up for.
“I think Sam brought me back to torture me,” Elordi joked to Domingo. “It was like, six weeks of me just getting beat by a seven-foot guy.”
That led into the finale sequence, which required Elordi to spend long stretches inside a coffin under heavy effects work.
“I got locked in a coffin for two days straight with prosthetics and a fake tongue, and I couldn’t see out of my eyes,” he said. “And then Sam put snakes into the coffin.”
The scene was meant to show Nate dying after a rattlesnake bite, a suitably brutal exit for a character who has spent much of the series making life worse for everyone within emotional striking distance.
The rattlesnake was actually a boa constrictor
The snake in the coffin was not a rattlesnake, but a boa constrictor standing in for one in the final episode. According to Elordi, the animal did not exactly bring villain energy to the set.
“He had a very nice personality. He was very docile and very sleepy. I don’t think he’d had a lot of sun,” Elordi said. “I was kind of nudging him, trying to get him to get active and do the scene, ‘cause he was meant to be threatening. But he was like a little dog. He just kept curling up at my feet.”
Elordi said the snake would drop into the coffin through a tube, slide down, and then settle wherever it found warmth.
“He'd drop down the tube and then he'd sort of slither down,” he added, “and then he'd find a little warm spot.”
So, yes, the actor was sealed into a coffin for two days with prosthetics, impaired vision, and a large snake. His main note: the snake was sleepy.
Why the scene was still fun for Elordi
For all the on-screen misery, Elordi said the work itself was enjoyable. Part of the appeal, apparently, was that a death scene does not require much dialogue.
“You don’t have any lines,” he said. “So you just have to go like, ‘Ahhhhhh!’ That’s all you gotta do. It’s great.”
It is a very actor-specific definition of “great,” but it also fits the mood of Euphoria, where emotional collapse and elaborate visual punishment have often arrived as a matching set.
Elordi’s comments also underline the strange split between what viewers see and what actors actually remember. The audience gets a gruesome death. The performer remembers prosthetics, timing, blocking, and trying to encourage a boa constrictor to look slightly less ready for a nap.
What actually scares him
Despite the coffin, the burial setup, and the snake, Elordi said his real fears are the dark, dying, and, unexpectedly, dish water.
That last one caught Domingo’s attention, understandably. Elordi explained that washing dishes becomes a different experience once food scraps start floating around.
“You know when it gets like little bits of pulled chicken in there, a little bit of leftover lentil,” he said. “It's like lukewarm all the time. There's nothing you can do about it. You get your fingers in there.”
The Frankenstein actor appeared genuinely unsettled by the thought, while Domingo pressed him on how that could possibly be worse than sharing coffin space with a boa constrictor.
Elordi’s answer was simple: “You don’t know what’s in that dish water.”
For viewers, the exchange offered a neat little character study off-screen: the man can handle a staged death by snake, but not the mystery biology of a kitchen sink. Fair enough. At least the boa had a handler.
