Euphoria made her a household name, but Maude Apatow is forging a creative path all on her own terms
Photography by CHANTAL ANDERSON
Styling by PETRA FLANNERY STUDIO
Words by ROBERT HASKELL
Like most successful comedies, Poetic License anchors its humor in the serious stuff of life: the struggle to figure yourself out at the edge of adulthood or, if necessary, in midlife; the high-wire act of marriage and career; the heartbreak of watching your children grow up and begin to push you away. In a scene midway through the film, Liz — wife, mother, derelict psychotherapist, and auditor of a college poetry class — sits with her family in an ice cream parlor and makes a bumbling attempt at persuading her daughter to stay close to home for college. After her daughter bats away those appeals and excuses herself to be with friends, Liz’s husband leans in and says, “This is the first big decision she’s making on her own. She needs to learn to individuate.” “Individuate,” Liz mutters, miffed at having a bit of psychobabble tossed back at her. “Are you serious right now?”
“Euphoria was not my L.A. upbringing at all. The situations are insane, but the characters feel like people you know.”
The film, out in October, marks the directorial debut of Maude Apatow, known for her portrayal of Lexi Howard in two seasons of Euphoria, but also for her Hollywood pedigree as the daughter of director Judd Apatow and actor Leslie Mann, whom Maude cast as Liz in Poetic License. But if you find yourself wondering if there’s a bit of an individuation problem in the Apatow clan, you would be misreading the facts of the case.
Apatow was, by her admission, too young to process the experiences of acting in her father’s films beginning at age 7, typically cast as the daughter of the character played by her mother. “We are just a family that collaborates, and we’ve been collaborating for 20 years,” she tells me from a corner table at Hinoki & the Bird in Century City, her hands cupping a lavender hot-honey oat milk latte. She’s not quite recognizable enough that the surrounding CAA agents look up from their lunch meetings, but that may change when the long-awaited third season of Euphoria airs this spring.
It’s not that Apatow failed to find a path separate from her filmmaking family; it’s that having such a family made a nearly impossible path feel possible. “That’s a real privilege,” she says. “I always felt like it was doable. But it never seemed easy. People may think I just assumed I could do it. No! I’m so insecure all the time. I saw firsthand how hard it is. I never thought it would come easy or be easy.” She pauses. “I have to be careful about how I say this because people really” — she doesn’t finish the phrase, but her meaning is clear. Apatow was at the center of the nepo baby furor of 2022. “I never thought it was an easy path. I watched my parents working so hard, and it was treacherous at times. I saw the good and the bad, the highs and the lows of it, and I still wanted to do it.”
Her father’s films notwithstanding, Apatow wasn’t a Hollywood kid. She was more like a theater nerd, performing in musicals since the second grade and directing and producing theater in high school at Crossroads in Santa Monica. (Crossroads’ musical theater scene incubated future stars Ben Platt and Molly Gordon before her.) Two years ago, she started a production company, Jewelbox Pictures, with Olivia Rosenbloom, her best friend from Crossroads and another grown-up theater kid. The pair got their hands on an early draft of Poetic License, by Raffi Donatich, about two best-friend college seniors vying for the affection of a married woman twice their age. “I liked the tone,” Apatow says. “I liked how she wrote young people. It felt kind of weird and fresh but also very nostalgic. It reminded me of movies I liked growing up.”
“It was really important to me that I was creating a positive set.”
Apatow, 28, had spent a year and a half at Northwestern before she left to film Euphoria. She admired how Donatich’s script captured the self-seriousness and faux sophistication of college-age kids. The screenplay’s focus on a mother-daughter relationship also struck a chord. “My mom and I are very, very close, like best friends, and I love seeing that kind of relationship in movies,” she says. “That dynamic reminded me of us, so I was picturing her when I read it. I really couldn’t imagine anyone else doing it better. My mom’s great at hard physical comedy — she can get electrocuted in a funny way — but she’s also great at a sort of super-grounded comedic performance that has a lot of heart. It was really important that the character didn’t feel creepy, since she’s in this situation with two young guys. She has this sort of innocence and naïveté about her that makes it work.”
Directing her mother was not as awkward as might be expected. On the contrary, it was like putting on an old, familiar record. “We’ve always had the kind of relationship with each other where we feel comfortable talking things through creatively,” Apatow says. “We’re very open. Knowing someone so intimately, knowing what they can do and what they’re capable of, how to talk to them — all my experience with my mom helped me understand how she wanted to be treated and how to create an environment for her to do great work.”
Apatow has always bounced ideas off her father, but this time she tried not to ask him too many questions. “I wanted to figure things out for myself,” she says. “But I’ve observed the way he directs comedy, giving people time to play around with things and not being too precious about the way the dialogue is written, letting actors find things in their own voice.” Her experience as an actor also shaped her directing. “I’ve had very positive experiences as an actor,” she says. “But because I know what it feels like to be on someone else’s set, and how it changes from project to project based on the person in charge, it was really important to me that I was creating a positive set. I’ve observed the opposite, so I felt some pressure to make sure that everyone felt good. You get better work from people if they feel supported.”
For the role of Ari, one of the college seniors, Apatow cast Cooper Hoffman, whose performance in Licorice Pizza had amazed her. “He’s a very special actor,” she says. “He has something about him that reminds me of John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything.” For the part of Dora, Liz’s daughter, she cast Nico Parker. Parker is the daughter of the actress Thandiwe Newton, and Hoffman is the son of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman. With these choices Apatow may have opened herself up once again to the internet trolls, but she can live with it. “The truth is, they were just actually the best actors,” she says. “We read 200 young actors. Obviously, I don’t want to invite myself to get shit on any more for the nepo baby stuff, so if I didn’t believe 100 percent that they were the best ones for the job, I wouldn’t have cast them. It crossed my mind, of course. But I just thought, I’m going to hire based on talent.”
It’s been more than four years since the last episode of Euphoria aired, and the new season, out in April, finds its cast of precocious former teenagers back in Los Angeles after college. Lexi is now working at a prime-time soap opera as the assistant to the showrunner, played by Sharon Stone. Freed from the context of high school, the new season is less likely to strike the same fears in the hearts of West Side mothers as the first two did, with their frank and often unsettling depiction of teenage sex and drug addiction. “People would say to me, ‘I’m afraid to watch it. I have kids,’ ” Apatow says of those first seasons. “It’s a TV show, and it’s super-super-heightened. That was not my L.A. upbringing at all. But there’s a feeling in high school that you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, and everything is so intense. And Euphoria captures that intensity. So I think it makes people feel seen and validated. It’s totally dramatized, and the situations are insane, but the characters feel authentic and grounded and like people you know. That truthfulness is the reason it hit the way it did.”
“When tragedy happened, we were all there for each other in a way that I was very grateful for. It feels like a family.”
The show returns without the character of Fezco, played by Angus Cloud, who died of an accidental drug overdose in 2023. Apatow and Cloud worked together closely in the second season, and his death shook her. “I don’t really know how to talk about it,” she says. “It still feels raw to everyone. It’s just devastating. Angus was a really special, present actor to work with but also a really kind person. He always made people laugh. This season, we felt his absence. I was 20 when I started on that show, and we’ve all grown up together. When tragedy happened, we were all there for each other in a way that I was very grateful for. It feels sort of like a family.”
In the long hiatus between seasons, Apatow returned to her first love, musical theater, in productions of Little Shop of Horrors off-Broadway (as Audrey) and Cabaret (as Sally Bowles) in London. She bought an apartment in New York and anticipated spending more time there, but over the past year work has kept her in Los Angeles. She is single and lives in West Hollywood — not as far west as the L.A. of her childhood, and not as far east as the neighborhoods where many of her childhood friends have resettled as adults, and which she is just getting to know.
“I’m lucky,” she says. “My best friends have been my best friends since I was 5. I feel super-comfortable and supported in L.A. A lot of people don’t have that experience here, and it can be very isolating if you don’t have that support. L.A. is a place where you have to be very intentional with your plans. It’s not all right outside your door. These days I’m trying to make more of an effort to get myself out of the house.” To that end, she is always on the hunt for the best creamtop matcha and the newest sushi spot. She’s religious about her Pilates. “I sound like the worst person in the world — creamtop matchas and Pilates,” she says. “One of the amazing things about this city is that there’s so much for me still to discover, so much I don’t know.”
For the past few months — between sitting front row at Prada and winning the 2025 WIF Max Mara Face of the Future Award — Apatow has been writing a romantic comedy with her production partner. They’re also developing projects with other writers. Apatow wouldn’t mind returning to the theater in a straight play, and someday she might like to cast herself in something she directs. But not yet. “I don’t know how anyone acts and directs at the same time,” she says. “That is so large. I did not for a second think of casting myself in Poetic License. I barely knew what I was doing. So acting also? Are you kidding me? Respect to Bradley Cooper.”
Hair by CHERILYN FARRIS at Highlight Artists.
Makeup by SHELBY SMITH at Highlight Artists.
Manicure by CAROLINE COTTEN at The Wall Group.
Prop styling by PETER GUERACAGUE.
Photo retouching by @hue.retouch.
Shot on location at @thebeckettmansionla and @thephillipsresidence.
Feature image: MAUDE APATOW wears KHAITE top, $3,600, skirt, $4,400, and belt, $980. CARTIER watch, $44,000.
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2026 issue of C Magazine.
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