The trailer for the third season of Euphoria, released last April 13, ends up boasting about the achievements of its young protagonists. “Emmy winner, Zendaya; Emmy nominee, Sidney Sweeney; Oscar nominee, Jacob Elordi,” HBO boasts, before introducing Alexa Demie or Hunter Schafer without any qualifiers. The name missing is Barbie Ferreira (New York, 29 years old), one of the few actresses from previous seasons of the series who does not appear in this latest one. “After four years playing the most special and enigmatic character, Kat, I say goodbye with great sadness,” she announced back in 2022 on her Instagram stories — where she currently has 4.8 million followers. The text was shown over a drawing made by Schafer of Thunder Kit Kat, the character Ferreira’s alter ego dominatrix. “I hope many of you have seen yourselves reflected in her, as I did, and that it has made you happy to see her evolution into the character she is today,” she said goodbye.
Ferreira’s absence in the new Euphoria sparked theories about her supposed clashes with the series creator, Sam Levinson, over disagreements about the direction they wanted Kat to take. The Daily Beast published an extensive report on the filming of the second season highlighting the reduction of the actress’s screen time or her absence at the premiere. “Several sources from the production stated that Ferreira left the set at least twice. They also claim that a sex scene featuring Ferreira was cut from the final version of the episode,” it analyzed. The official version is that her departure was a mutual decision. “I don’t think [Kat] would have fit in the series. I don’t know if it would have done her justice, and I think both sides knew that I really wanted to stop being the fat best friend. I don’t want to play that role, and I don’t think they wanted it either,” she concluded on the Armchair Expert podcast in 2023.
After those statements, Ferreira has played a twenty-something who starts an online friendship with a man who has the same name as the father who just left her — in the film A ‘Like’ from Bob Trevino (2024), based on a true story — a kitchen assistant in the psychological thriller The House of Whispers (2024), or a music critic in the romantic comedy Mile End Kicks (which reached US theaters this Friday and will arrive in Spain on May 29), of which she is executive producer. The actress of Brazilian descent has managed to detach herself from scripts where discomfort with her weight is inherent to the character, but some fans now reproach her for precisely having accompanied the path to that goal with an evident weight loss, despite being considered a body positive role model — the social movement that promotes acceptance and self-love for all bodies.
“Since I have a bigger body than other people, they ask me about body positivity no matter what I do, and it’s not necessary. It doesn’t help normalize things. People have always considered me a body positive activist, but over the years, I’ve found my own version of the movement and it’s not all about size,” she confessed to Vogue in 2020. The New Yorker now has the same preference for super low-cut and super tight looks as before, but in the last two years, her public appearances wearing them are usually covered under headlines highlighting her “physical change,” preceded by adjectives like “brutal,” “shocking,” or “drastic.” Her Instagram poses are full of fire and heart emojis, but they also provoke comments like “Ozempic has claimed another victim” or “Her activism for diverse bodies was only because she had a diverse body, and when she no longer did, she enjoyed her privilege.”
Showing off her physique has never been embarrassing for Ferreira. Before becoming known as an actress, she started her career as a model in 2013, at 16, when she received a message from the brand American Apparel on her Tumblr profile encouraging her to audition. “I took a low-quality selfie and sent it. They signed me the next day; it was the strangest experience of my life,” she recalled in a 2016 interview with W Magazine, the year Time magazine included her in its list of the 30 most influential teenagers. That opened doors for her to work as a photographic model for Adidas, ASOS, or Forever 21, but her star moment was in 2025, when she debuted as a Victoria’s Secret angel. “I hadn’t even thought about walking a runway, much less Victoria’s Secret’s, which is the most important. It took me a while to process what that meant because I didn’t expect it at all. And then I got really emotional,” she told People before the lingerie brand’s high-profile show.
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While the internet is divided between those who praise her and those who accuse her of betraying her supposed cause, she enjoys life beyond the series that made her famous in 2019. “Now I feel free to do what I really want, produce things I like, and participate in stories for which I probably wouldn’t have had time if I had been on Euphoria,” she said in 2025 in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. One of those projects is the remake of the horror movie Faces of Death, which premiered in the United States on April 10 — no confirmed date yet in Spain. She is the lead, an online content moderator who comes across a series of violent videos that replay death scenes from a movie. The cast also includes Dacre Montgomery — known for Stranger Things — and Charli XCX. “I adore Charli. We’ve been friends for a long time, so it was great to work with a friend I admire and whose music I’ve always been a big fan of,” she told People about the singer in early April.
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Zendaya, Sweeney, and Elordi have become the most desired on red carpets and are direct contenders for future award season predictions. Ferreira, for now, feels more comfortable in independent cinema and, lately, in horror — a genre to which three of her last five films belong. “This weekend we put on a truly spooky show,” she celebrated on Instagram about the premiere of the new movie, where her bloody footwear was much talked about. “I make independent films that are literally made on a minimal budget, but they are great and real stories. I prefer that to being in the most-watched show in the world in a background role, unable to act,” she defended this Tuesday in a preview of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast.
Aside from her film career, she has just released a capsule collection with the lifestyle brand For Your Soul, featuring lots of sweatshirts and tracksuits. It is advertised as “a limited edition inspired by daily rituals and the small moments people return to,” and Ferreira herself shared her morning rituals to promote it: “I wake up, go straight into the empty bathtub, turn on the tap, and let it fill with me inside. That’s how I wake up.”
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The more famous Ferreira becomes, the less she talks about her private life in interviews. It is known that she was raised in New Jersey in a home of Brazilian immigrant women — her mother, her aunt, and her grandmother — without any father figure. “It was tough,” she described her childhood in Cosmopolitan in 2020, where she said her mother spent the day out of the house, balancing her culinary studies with exhausting restaurant work, and it was her grandmother who entertained her by inventing stories. Regarding romantic relationships, the only one known was the one she had between 2019 and 2022 with musician Elle Pucket, who currently is part of the band that accompanies Gracie Abrams in her concerts. “I love being queer. I love being fat. I love being Brazilian. I love being from New York. All my identities are what make me Barbie,” she defended in 2019 in an interview with the LGTBIQ+ content magazine Them.
She is Barbie and will never be Kat again. Still, in the memory of many remains the revealing speech her character delivers in Euphoria that could well summarize the actress’s current moment, regardless of her weight: “Can I be honest with you? I’ve realized that… all my life, the only thing I’ve tried to do is take up less space. I’ve tried to hide from the boys who maybe whispered to their friends when they saw me pass by. I spent my life afraid that people would find out I was fat. But honestly, who cares? There’s nothing more powerful than a fat girl who doesn’t care about anything.”
