Maude Apatow Takes Center Stage in ‘Little Shop of Horrors’

In the first season of Euphoria, Lexi Howard was relegated to a background character in the more chaotic lives of her friends and family. Played by Maude Apatow in her breakout role, Lexi finally took the spotlight in Season 2, when she staged the most elaborate musical in the history of high school theater. 

The once sheepish Lexi lets her inner tyrant loose as she hurls insults at the crew and directs the production with comically scary precision. While Apatow never got quite as heated when she starred in her high school productions of Cabaret and Into the Woods, those experiences certainly informed Lexi’s arc. “I sorta pitched our showrunner the idea of Lexi being a theater kid who took her craft too seriously,” Apatow tells Vogue. “And that was absolutely inspired by me being a musical theater obsessive who freaked out a lot of people in high school!” 

Apatow can trace her love of theater back to a single show: Little Shop of Horrors. She was in the first grade when her neighbor starred in a children’s production of the musical and would play the ‘60s doo-wop-inspired cast recording. Apatow fell in love and downloaded it onto her iPod Nano immediately, listening to “Suddenly, Seymour” and “Somewhere That’s Green” on an endless loop. When her filmmaker father Judd Apatow was shooting a project in North Carolina, she made the family attend a local production of Little Shop that officially opened her eyes to the magic of theater. 

“I’ve always been obsessed with the musical because it sort of introduced me to the genre as a whole,” she says. “When I heard there was a chance I could send in my materials to audition for the role of Audrey, it seemed too good to be true.”