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(Picture: Petra Collins)‘I think it’s all changed our lives very quickly,’ Barbie Ferreira understates.
She is at home in Los Angeles, her ‘first-born’ cat, a sphinx named Morty — short for Mortimer — curled contentedly in her lap, while two others, Magdalena and Thomas, scrap on the sofa cushions behind her. The 25-year-old actress and model shot to Gen Z super fame in the summer of 2019, playing the role of Kat Hernandez in Euphoria, the HBO ensemble teen drama led by Zendaya. Six months later, the pandemic forced the world to shut down, giving Ferreira and her castmates a year off to process their new celebrity.
‘It was interesting to have the situation where you think you would be so busy, especially for the next year if nothing else, but then it was the exact opposite, where I’ve never had so much time off,’ says Ferreira. Born in Queens, New York, she started modelling at 16. Photographer Petra Collins, the creative behind Ferreira’s shoot for ES, was an instrumental part of her early success. ‘Petra shot my first editorial — she was the first person to really see me as a model, as a unique talent,’ says Ferreira now. ‘This is the first time we’ve shot together since I was 19. It’s been so great to come back to it, and the pictures are HOT! She’s my queen.’
Euphoria — for those who have somehow missed its cultural dominance — is the show. The one everyone talks about. ‘I go out to dinner and I hear the soundtrack,’ says Ferreira. It has a fervid online fanbase, the type of audience that has the show dominating Twitter trends for the day or two after an episode has aired. It launches memes, TikTok trends, fashion styles and — most importantly — conversations. These are conversations about difficult, sensitive, uncomfortable issues such as addiction, crime, trauma, exploitation, misogyny, sexuality and gender identity playing out over the raw, exposed nerve endings of teenage emotion. It averages 16 million viewers an episode and has generated more than 30 million tweets, making it the most discussed show on the platform of all time. People care deeply about what happens to the girls at the centre of the story: grieving, mentally-ill teenage drug addict Rue Bennett and her friends.
Ferreira’s ascent to stardom was a slow one. In 2016, Time named her as one of its 30 Influential Teens after her unretouched Aerie swimsuit campaign went viral. Two years later, she won the Best Web Personality/Host at the 2018 Webby Awards for her Vice show, How to Behave, in which she learned etiquette. Later that year, she landed a small role in the HBO series Divorce, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, before being cast in Euphoria and catapulting out of the hustle and into the big league, practically overnight.
‘I’m thankful I’m older,’ says Ferreira. ‘I sympathise with those who are really young going into this. It’s really hard to navigate and keep your identity as yourself, and that’s really important to me.’ The main Euphoria cast, all in their early to mid-20s — with the exception of Zendaya — are relative newcomers to mainstream attention and find each other a huge source of support as they navigate their shared experience. ‘It’s almost like we’re at this crazy theatre camp all the time. It’s nice that I can always have people to talk to because… it’s a lot, you know?’ she says, before summing up the complexity of the celebrity that Euphoria has bestowed upon them in one succinct sentence: ‘It’s made everything so fun, but very high stress.’
Ferreira’s character Kat is in the lineage of 1990s cult favourites such as MTV’s titular Daria or Enid and Rebecca from Ghost World; in Ferreira’s words, ‘A really flawed, bitchy, inherently cool character, all these monotone, cutting deep one-liners, very tough exterior, I don’t care about anything kind of vibe, but so much heart.’ At East Highland High School (‘or Euphoria High, as the kids say!’), Kat is a sardonic teenager, insecure about her body image, who feels unattractive and unappreciated by her peers. A potentially humiliating event in the pilot episode of the show sets Kat up for a more confident, sexual side of her to emerge as an online camgirl called KittenKween. It’s a twisted twist on the makeover scene trope. ‘At first Kat was supposed to be this quote unquote unattractive girl,’ says Ferreira, who was instrumental in developing the character alongside Euphoria’s creator and writer Sam Levinson. ‘So I made sure that it wasn’t going to be the makeover scene where she takes off her glasses and all of a sudden — wow! hot! I wanted the makeover scene to be… kind of worse?’ she laughs.
Where the makeover scene in a teen movie usually marks a turning point for the better in a character’s fortune, for Kat the opposite occurs. As season two closes out, Kat is behaving erratically and feeling more miserable and isolated than ever before. Fans were vocally dissatisfied with how Kat’s storyline played out in the latest episodes, and rumours have swirled that Levinson’s desire to see Kat struggle with an eating disorder blew up into an argument between Ferreira and Levinson, leading to her being almost entirely written out. Ferreira’s conspicuous absence from the season two premiere seemed to confirm a rift.
Ferreira laughs at the suggestion that fans know to place the blame for any perceived shortcomings in the storytelling at Levinson’s door, even as she attempts to answer for them herself without further agitating the situation. With scripts for season three yet to be written, she is just as in the dark about Kat’s future as the audience. Will we see more of her? ‘I think there’s so much more to Kat’s story and we’re just now skimming the top of it. So I hope so,’ says Ferreira. ‘I love the show, I love my character, but I also can do other things. So hopefully, there’s more complex characters in my future and Kat’s storyline is not disappointing for anybody next season.’
Ferreira borrowed a lot from her own life when building the character of Kat. ‘I had a very clear vision as soon as I read the script,’ she says of her work. ‘I remember reading and auditioning for it and being like, this character is someone that I know. The energy levels and the characterisation and the mannerisms are different, but events leading up to the big things have parallels to me. I went to a very big public school and I was just in the wrong place, people didn’t really get me. It’s this feeling of being lonely and knowing you have more to offer but that restlessness of: “How do I get out of this? How do I grow from this?” I didn’t do camming, but I did modelling, which is a lot like camming, just less nudity.’
Modelling was a gateway for Ferreira. The ultimate goal was always a career in acting, as proved by the short bio that accompanies the image from her first campaign for American Apparel: ‘She’s an employee of ours from New Jersey… and hopes to pursue a career in acting.’ Considered a ‘curve’ or plus-size model by industry standards, Ferreira spent a lot of her young adulthood discussing her body. These days, she’s over it.
‘I love to talk about it, that’s the problem,’ she says. ‘I wish it was an issue I could talk about without it being this clickbait-y thing, because in general, I have so much to say about everyone’s relationship with food and body image. People look different than what Hollywood and fashion put out there. Fact. It’s a uniquely American obsession to look like you have a filter on all the time.’
Central to Ferreira’s frustrations is the way that the word ‘confidence’ — which she has in bucket loads — has become ‘somewhat of a trigger’ for her. ‘What confidence is, versus what people on the internet project on me, are two very different things,’ she says. ‘Most of the time I get my confidence from performing. But I think when people think of confidence and they think of Barbie Ferreira, they think about my body, and I hate talking about my body because no matter what I say, it will be the headline. A lot of people talk about the pressure to stay thin, and that’s not the focus. But if I talk about how my body image affects me, everyone writes 35 articles about that one quote from an interview about the moisturiser I’m putting on my callused feet.’
The topic puts her in a bind. ‘My body has been the centre of attention of my whole life, since I was 16, and that’s on me, I was a model,’ she says matter-of-factly. ‘That’s something I really took ownership of and really liked to talk about because I felt really passionate about the fact that there wasn’t enough people of varying sizes in the media in general. It’s been nine years since I started modelling. I have said all there has to be said.’
Besides, Ferreira has much more going on right now. Euphoria has just been renewed for season three. Last month she was announced as the new face of YSL Beauty, launching the brand’s new Lash Clash mascara. This summer she will appear in Jordan Peele’s upcoming horror Nope, alongside Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer and Steven Yeun. She refuses to drop a hint about what to expect. ‘Jordan is a very secretive director — I bow down to the art and the craft so I’m not gonna spoil anything but I will say it’s crazy and amazing, and I’m such a fan of him.’
One project she is definitely not involved with is the upcoming Madonna biopic — Ferreira was reported to be battling for the title role with a parade of young starlets including her Euphoria co-star, Sydney Sweeney. ‘Last night I was texting Sydney because I was like, “Did you even audition for Madonna!?! Because I didn’t!” I’ve never auditioned for Madonna!’ Ferreira says, visibly confused as to how her name and that of the pop icon came to be mentioned in the same sentence. ‘I can’t sing, I can’t dance, I look nothing like her. I think the surprise for me is that people will just write whatever, without even fact-checking. It’s the kind of lie where it’s like… it just isn’t true!’
It has been interesting for Ferreira to experience the ‘big social experiment’ of the media from a brand new angle. ‘A lot of people don’t get to see it from the other side,’ she says. ‘As someone who was actively on the internet a lot as a kid, looking back I would be more sceptical, not believe everything I see.’
For the most part, she takes the less comfortable elements of celebrity — erroneous headlines, being recognised in public, or stumbling across a video of herself on TikTok — in her stride. As a veteran of huge online fandoms for era-defining pop culture such as Harry Potter and One Direction, she is uniquely appreciative of the outpouring of emotions — both good and bad — directed towards her and her fellow cast members. ‘I feel like I know the inner workings of these kind of things,’ she says. ‘My family tends to be in the background — my mom is a chef, my grandma cleaned houses, I was the kid outside the concert, loving something so much I wanted to connect with it. We’re very low-key people. Now I do something that pulls me to the forefront, it makes me feel really special and happy to have people feel the same way about me as I felt about others. I totally get it.’
