It’s a familiar Hollywood story by now: A normal person gets plucked from relative obscurity and hoisted into an unfamiliar social strata. It’s played out on the big screen in movies like My Fair Lady and The Jerk, but rarely does it happen so matter-of-factly in real life. And it may never have been handled with the nonchalance of Angus Cloud.

Cloud stars on HBO’s buzzy summer breakout hit, Euphoria, which follows a group of high schoolers doing drugs, having sex, filming it all, and blackmailing the hell out of each along the way. Over its short eight-episode stretch, Euphoria (which is executively produced by its stars’ fellow cool teen, Drake) has rapidly built a fervent fan base, becoming appointment viewing for the generation that aren’t just cord cutters, but the ones that never had any cords to begin with.

Playing Fez, a drug dealer with a heart of gold, Cloud has similarly amassed ardent supporters who would “literally murder for him,” according to Twitter. Amongst a stacked cast that includes former child actors, models-turned-performers, and the love interest from Netflix’s The Kissing Booth—all of which are led by Hollywood’s most sought after twenty-something, Zendaya—Cloud is unique. He is less so an actor by training, or even by desire, and more so one by complete chance, with Euphoria being his first ever credit.

Last year, the Oakland native was walking down a Manhattan street. He doesn’t exactly remember the street or why he was walking down it on that particular day or even why he was in Manhattan at all. The thing about Angus Cloud is that he isn’t big on the small details. He hits the major plot points but he’s not like his media trained peers that stash away delightful little anecdotes they can pull out when prying people like journalists ask them about auditioning, rehearsing, filming, eating, breathing, ad nauseam.

So Cloud was walking down that street when he was stopped by a pushy representative who said she worked for a casting company, asking him to come in to read for a new TV series. “I was confused and I didn’t want to give her my phone number,” he says. “I thought it was a scam.” But then, later, he later found himself in a nondescript room, filled with very serious people very seriously staring at him as he read lines from what would become Euphoria’s first episode. “I had to change it a little bit,” he says of the pages he was given. “To make it sound real, like how I would say it.”