Inside ‘Euphoria’ Episode 7’s ‘Super Homoerotic’ Dance Number: ‘Let’s Just Pay Tribute to the Peen’

variety.com:

Ellise Shafer SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not seen “Euphoria” Season 2, Episode 7, “The Theater and Its Double.” When Ryan Heffington set out to choreograph the dance number in the penultimate episode of “Euphoria” Season 2, he took a cue from the song it’s set to, Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero.”“I knew it was — and had to be — larger than life,” Heffington tells Variety of the dance, which takes place during Lexi’s (Maude Apatow) play and features over a dozen men in shiny gold football pants gyrating against work out equipment — and each other — in the locker room.

Ethan (Austin Abrams) stars in the dance as a character mirroring Nate (Jacob Elordi), whose sexuality (and homophobia) has been bottling underneath the surface during the past two seasons.

When Heffington — who choreographed “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and several Sia music videos — first talked with show creator Sam Levinson about the scene, he remembers the initial script calling for “tons of baby oil and rubbing and massaging,” and that it “would be super homoerotic to the nth degree.”Heffington says Levinson “wanted David Bowie to look straight” in comparison to the dance. “So that was a really good launching point of where I should go with this piece,” Heffington says.From there, Heffington and his assistant Ryan Spencer began conceptualizing the piece, leaning on Tyler’s ’80s hit and teenage hormones to inspire the movements.“It’s based in the psyche of a teenager, so I wanted it to have this definite humor foundation to it.

In high school, boys are all about ejaculation and the senses being sexual 24 hours a day, so I wanted to get as much of that into this piece as possible,” Heffington says. “It was just an ode to us boys in high.