Will the real Nate Jacobs please stand up?
Jacob Elordi’s “Euphoria” character is receiving a lot of backlash from viewers after the Season 3 premiere.
“They gave Nate Jacobs 200mg of sertraline and a lobotomy,” one fan complained on X (formerly Twitter).
Another fan said: “It’s such a shame that Cassie offered to sell porn,” to which Nate responded: “I didn’t punch a wall or scream at her…I think lobotomies are still legal in 2026.”
A third viewer was on board the “lobotomy” train, saying the character must have had a lobotomy because the version of Nate that appeared in seasons 1 and 2 “couldn’t stand Cassie.”
In the first two seasons of Sam Levinson’s HBO drama, Nate Jacobs was a psycho jock with anger issues. When his girlfriend embarrassed him in public, he strangled her and blackmailed another man to take the blame. He also threatened people with a gun.
Elordi played him with such manic energy that Nate looked like he was about to snap and kill someone.
If viewers of Euphoria were to criticize Nate, they would think that means he did something terrible again. However, it turned out that fans were angry that he was so out of character and acting too “submissive” and “clean”.
Nate, who has infuriated fans with his despicable behavior for two seasons, is now infuriating fans with being too kind without having enough of a story to explain his changes.
Season 3 picks up the characters five years in the future, and as another reviewer commented, Nate seemed to have “changed his personality.”
In this season, we find out that Nate and Cassie (Sidney Sweeney) are engaged and living together. Kathy is trying to build a career on OnlyFans, where she posts photos and videos online wearing fetish costumes, including dogs. She claims she’s doing it to pay for the $50,000 flower arrangement she wants for her wedding.
Nate is a little irritated with Cassie, but is ultimately okay and tells Cassie, “Baby, I’m about to give you everything you want.”
It clashes with Nate’s character from past seasons of the show.
In season 1, Nate said of Cassie that he “beat her like a whore and then kicked her to the curb.” He criticizes his first girlfriend, Maddie (Alexa Demme), for wearing revealing clothing and ridicules her for making her look like a “prostitute”. In season 2, he never seemed to love Cassie, as he repeatedly manipulated and degraded her.
His actions in season 3 are coming out of left field.
Another viewer criticized that it was strange to see Nate go through a “period of being recognized as a threat to society” and then enter a “submissive househusband phase.”
Another commenter wrote: “Nate Jacobs turned into Jacob Errol.”
Another viewer said, “I want Nate to change because he had a real reason to change. Not because they’ve been lazy with his character now that Jacob has gained worldwide recognition and fame.” “And they’re making him do all the lifting with no text to back it up. This isn’t Nate Jacobs, this is a stranger.”
Another fan slammed the Season 3 version of Nate as a “completely sanitized character out of thin air,” while another fumed, “You can’t sand the edges of a character this important and viscerally after such a hiatus without any clues as to what happened…That’s a stranger.”
“Euphoria” Season 3 airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO.
