Barbie Ferreira on Euphoria, confidence and what’s coming next for Kat

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.’