Where is Alexa Demie, the breakout star of Euphoria season one, and what is she doing now?

By Abby Amoakuh

Updated May 7, 2024 at 02:12 PM

Reading time: 5 minutes

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Image courtesy of IMDb

It’s fair to say that when season two of Euphoria decided to focus on the characters of Nate and Cassie, actors Sydney Sweeney and Jacob Elordi milked that extra screen time for every ounce it was worth. Two years on and Sweeney has brought rom-coms back (albeit mediocre ones) with the box office hit Anyone But You, whereas Elordi has been dazzling audiences in the biopic Priscilla and ‘eat the rich’ thriller Saltburn. 

But where is the much-lauded star of season one, Alexa Demie, who played the iconic cheerleader Maddy Perez? It seems like the starlet who was once hailed as the “breakout star” of the show has disappeared. So SCREENSHOT set out to investigate exactly what happened to the actress.

In the words of Wonderland, she’s the “Patron Saint of girls who like their acrylics long and their eyeliner flicked with ferocity.” In much simpler terms, Alexa Demie is an American actress, singer, designer and Gen Z fashion and makeup pioneer.

The Hollywood supernova grew up in Los Angeles, California as the daughter of single mother Rose Mendez, a make-up artist whose family immigrated to LA from Mexico. Demie’s upbringing was marked by adventures, to say the least. The starlet lived next door to an apartment full of meth-heads and across the street from a whole meth lab.

“I experienced some crazy shit,” Demie shared in a 2019 interview with The Face. “I knew all the kids in the neighbourhood. We would all ride bikes and hang out and go down to the river. It was normal for us to see the drug addicts. Across the street from our house was a literal meth lab. I remember one day the cops came and busted the house. They were like: ‘If one thing would’ve lit on fire, this entire block would’ve blown up.’”

Despite this, Demie still benefited from growing up in such close proximity to her family, vibrant party spots, and the glitz and glam of Hollywood. “There was my mum and me,” she remembers, “and then next door was my grandma, all my uncles and then my aunt in the back house. And there was the meth house across the street. But also, just at the corner was the Black Eyed Peas’ studio. I would see Fergie in her little camo pants and Timberland heels going in to record.”

By learning to trust her instincts and staying out of trouble, Demie started to pursue her passion for design and bought a box of wholesale sunglasses, which she decorated with jewels when she was in high school. Her little afterschool hobby started to turn into a sunglasses line called Mainframe, which was quickly stocked at a store on Melrose Avenue in LA after a friend connected her with them.

Flash forward and her sales began to skyrocket in Asia, with A-list celebs like South Korean rapper G-Dragon, Jennifer Lopez, and Nicki Minaj wearing her creations. The actress stopped selling the sunglasses though, due to a lack of business expertise and a failure of the brand to generate any profit for her.

After an incredibly brief stint at an art college in New York City, Demie decided to return to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career.

Alexa Demie’s claim to fame was her role as Maddy Perez in the teen drama Euphoria. Perez is a former pageant queen stuck in an abusive relationship with a jock named Nate Jacobs. Jacobs is confusingly also entangled with Perez’s best friend, Cassie Howard, from season two. The show definitely serves up juicy drama with incredible performances by Demie, Elordie and Sweeney.

With her portrayal of Perez, Demie managed to embody the pain, vulnerability, and audacious nature of young Gen Z women. This eccentric and shattered youth was also visible in Maddy’s bold outfits and outlandish makeup looks that turned the character into a popular Pinterest inspo board.

Demie, who actively forged the character’s appearance with her knowledge of fashion and makeup, was canonised into a Hollywood icon overnight and made it into Vogue spreads, fashion shows, the Dazed 100 list and so on.

Yet, she hasn’t been involved in many other major projects since season one aired in 2019.

After one mad man’s haunt across the world wide web, I was also able to uncover that Demie is living in a three-bedroom house in San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles with two dogs and a yard full of citrus and avocado trees as of 2019, according to The New York Times. Aside from that, I was confronted with a black hole of information…

Despite sharing quite a lot about her upbringing, Demie’s present life remains shrouded in mystery with very little known about the star.

Even her age remains the subject of much speculation, with the New York Times, Dazed and The Face citing it as 24 in 2019, when it is now believed that it must have been much closer to 29 at that time.

Besides a very short cameo in 2023’s dumpster fire of a TV show, The Idol, the star also hasn’t acted in anything since the 2021 short film Nineteen on Fire.

Obviously, it didn’t take long for online sleuths to realise that she also hasn’t been updating her breathtaking Instagram feed, aside from a post for a Calvin Klein campaign dating back to August 2023. Where is the starlet? Is she becoming a bit too mysterious for the good of her own career?

Alexa Demie is working on a range of uncompleted projects, from what it looks like. During her hiatus from Euphoria after season one, Demie announced that she was launching her own fashion, beauty and accessories brand, however, no such brand has seen the light of day in the past few years. It’s a shame—we all know it would slap.

The multi-hyphenate also announced that she was working on a biographical movie about her mother’s life as a professional makeup artist who grew up in the 1980s Hollywood club scene. However, this project also seems to have fizzled out with no updates since she first talked about its development five years ago.

Demie was briefly considered for the role of Madonna in the upcoming movie about the singer’s life, however, she lost out to Julia Garner. Madonna still invited Demie to be a judge on her Celebration Tour though, which is an honour bestowed to only a few celebrities including Úrsula Corberó and Donatella Versace.

After campaigns with household brands such as MAC, Balenciaga, and Calvin Klein, more recently, Demie also hasn’t been visible in any other collaborations or modelling gigs…

For a while, it looked like the actress was about to launch a music career with the singles ‘Girl Like Me’ and ‘Leopard Limo’. Yet, she hasn’t released anything in two years and can currently only list these two songs in her discography.

So where the hell is Alexa Demie? What is she up to now? We need to know!

It is perfectly possible that the actress is just very selective with the projects she wants to dedicate her time to. Granted, she hasn’t gotten big parts in movies like The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Priscila, or Challengers, like her co-stars Hunter Schafer, Elordi, and Zendaya. But it can also be noted that Demie hasn’t clawed herself through a string of badly scripted, cliché-saturated commercial projects to fight her way to these roles.

“I’ve always been like extremely specific and picky,” Demie said of her process for considering new projects in an interview with Collider. “I’m grateful to have worked with some incredible filmmakers. I just know what I like when read something. I have a certain taste level, and I’ve been really true to that, and will continue to be true to that. It really is a feeling. When you read something, you get a feeling, or you don’t. Everything I know that I’ve wanted, I’ve gotten. There are things that I think I wanted and I really liked, but I didn’t get.”

The interview dates back to 2019 and could potentially sum up what is happening in Demie’s career right now. Contrary to Sweeney and Elordi, who have both admitted to taking on projects they don’t like, Demie might be unwilling to ignore her gut feeling and compromise her artistic integrity to star in movies that don’t resonate with her.

Granted, it doesn’t necessarily allow her to build the high-level profile and portfolio you would expect from a star of her calibre. However, it is still refreshing to see a celebrity prioritising her personal and artistic fulfilment over fighting herself to the top of an industry that will most likely always have a job for her.

Perhaps growing up in Los Angeles amid all the glitz and glamour and living through the harsh realities that were hiding behind it disillusioned the star from the idea that she has to seek anything else in this life besides the fulfilment of her truest, unaltered dreams.