When I met Angus Cloud last summer, he was still adjusting to his life as the 24-year-old fan favorite of HBO’s then-second-biggest series of all time after “Game of Thrones.” Moving so quickly from being a waiter to starring in “Euphoria” would have driven anyone else to madness, trying to devise fervent strategies for making it all last. But on the day I grabbed dessert with him, all Cloud wanted was to buy the baseball cap worn by the ice cream parlor employees.

Getting to know Cloud, who died on Monday at age 25, was the funniest, strangest experience of my career. As a journalist, my work on each story is meant to end on the day of publication; my subjects are not my friends, and the impact of my writing on their reputations is for the world to decide. But Cloud made that detachment difficult for me. He was widely loved, but equally misunderstood, and over the past year, I’ve found myself agonizing when people get him wrong.

Viewers took Cloud’s blunt, low-key demeanor as a free pass to label him as identical to Fezco, the drug dealer he played on “Euphoria.” But he was an actor inhabiting a role, and beyond that, a full person. Regardless of his demons, which are still coming to light, his soul was on full display to the people who approached him with genuine curiosity.

I’ll admit that I was initially less than thrilled when I was assigned to write about Cloud. Though I admired his work on “Euphoria,” and didn’t buy into the chatter that he was just like his character, I couldn’t figure out who he was. His previous interviews featured one-word answers that I didn’t know how to turn into a 2,000-word cover story, and I wasn’t sure how I’d manage to get him to open up.

So I reached out to people I thought could help me connect with him. Jennifer Venditti, “Euphoria’s” casting director, told me about her frustrations with people’s ideas about him, and lauded him for how “sensitive and curious and open” he was on camera. Augustine Frizzell, who directed the “Euphoria” pilot, told me that he was “magnetic” in conversation, and that the feeling of putting a script in front of him was like “finding diamonds.” When I asked her for any last prevailing thoughts or memories of Cloud before we got off the phone, she said, “You know about his injury, right?”

I didn’t.

After I agreed not to publish anything sensitive or revealing without talking to Cloud about it first, she told me that he’d sustained a traumatic brain injury as a teenager that completely altered the course of his life, and that’s where his (and Fezco’s) scarred scalp came from. Frizzell was naturally hesitant to share these details, but she was mostly confused: “Anything an actor told me in confidence, I wouldn’t talk about,” she told me. “But everybody on set knew. He was completely open about it. Are you sure this isn’t in the press?”

I was nervous to broach the topic with Cloud. But the more I heard from people who knew him, and the more of his interviews I read, I got the feeling that his one-word answers were just evidence of his relationship to the Hollywood machine, or lack of it. Cloud was a former restaurant server who spoke with an Oakland affect and didn’t put any effort into playing the game. People didn’t see him as capable of depth, so they didn’t give him the opportunity to show any.

As soon as I asked Cloud about his scar, he told me the full story, beginning with: “I broke my skull on Friday the 13th.” I didn’t have to prod or pry to get the details. Within minutes, it became clear that his freak accident was the cause of his slowed speech — and his speech was the reason people stereotyped him. I was almost frustrated that he’d never spoken up about the injury before. Why let people make fun of you when you have the ammunition to prove that their bullying is uninformed and ableist? But I gained respect for the way he saw it: The only reason people didn’t know is that they didn’t ask. In his words, “You can believe what you want. It ain’t got nothing to do with me.”

A few pieces of our interview went viral. The hilarious moment when he cited the five-second rule before eating an ice cream cone off the ground, for one. And, notably, speaking on how he soothed his anxieties about fame, he said, “I didn’t spend my whole life trying to be an actor, so I’m not finna be devastated if I didn’t do a good job on some shit where I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. It’s not like I fucked my whole life up. Y’all hired me!”

I’d like to think that most people were joining me in laughing at these quotes in good faith. But no doubt, many took his remarks out of context, and further used his eccentricities to make conjectures about his drug use. In the year since, I’ve seen that narrative continue to snowball, with someone who claimed to be his former manager posting on social media that Cloud was under the influence of drugs in a video we shot after our interview. (That person was not present for the shoot. I was with Cloud for four straight hours that day and witnessed no drug use.)

I won’t pretend to know the details of everything Cloud was going through. In a statement after his death, Cloud’s family said that he “intensely struggled” with the recent death of his father and that he was “open about his battle with mental health.” “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson shared that Cloud “struggled, like many of us, with addiction and depression.”

What I do know is that no matter what qualities Cloud may have shared with Fezco, discrediting his talent and joking about his private life was a deeply ungenerous way to view a young actor in pain.

At Variety‘s Power of Young Hollywood party in August 2022, where Cloud was an honoree, I saw yet another side of him. Outside of the context of an interview, he no longer felt pressure to perform. He greeted me warmly and asked if I would autograph his copy of the magazine. I said that I would, as long as he’d sign an issue for me. I watched as he danced, laughed and spoke at length with the hometown friends from Oakland he’d brought with him.

Cloud wasn’t interested in networking and didn’t pay any mind to the Hollywood types present — besides one executive from his agency, who understood what he really wanted and handed it to him. With glee, Cloud unwrapped his gift: a simple black baseball cap that read “Mateo’s Ice Cream.”

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