Dominic Fike is talking me through his face tattoos. Specifically, the musician, actor and breakout star of Euphoria is telling me about how high he was when he got his first face tattoo at the age of 16. ‘It was a dipshit thing,’ he elaborates, schlumped in a chair in a New York photography studio. ‘I was weed-high. Which is not the time to get your first face tattoo.’
Mercy, no. But face tattoos were the style in south Florida rap at the time and Fike was part of a collective called Lame Boys ENT. So having ‘LBE’ permanently scarred on his forehead seemed like a good idea. Then the paranoia kicked in and with it, what military strategists term ‘mission creep’. He thought that LBE looked ‘weird’ and reasoned that the best course of action would be to get another face tattoo to distract from it. ‘This guy who was doing the tattoo, he didn’t even speak English, he had a MacBook and I was like: “Can you just put that on my face?” He said: “Are you sure?’’’ Which is how Dominic Fike came to have an apple tattoo on the underside of his right eye.
As it turns out, this is far from the stupidest thing that this young man has done while high. There was the time that Fike consumed a large amount of cocaine while under house arrest for assaulting a police officer, before remembering he was supposed to do a drug test. He surmised — wrongly as it turned out — that if he did the test quickly enough, the cocaine wouldn’t show up in his pee. That one cost him a year in jail. There was also the time that he landed his first audition for Euphoria. ‘I was with this group of girls, drinking Scotch, and one of them pulls out a bag of mushrooms and I just decided to take them all to be funny. And I started tripping in the audition. So I f***ed that up pretty bad,’ he smiles.
He can laugh about it now because at the age of 27, having already burned, cat-like, through a number of lives, Fike seems to have landed on his feet. A little unsteady, perhaps, but he’s still standing. He made it through jail. He is readying his second album. He did, in the end, secure a second audition for Euphoria — ‘Sam [Levinson, the show’s creator] is a f***ing drug addict, so he understands’ — and wound up with a gift of a role as the guitar-playing screw-up, Elliot. He even dated co-star Hunter Schafer for a while too. And thanks to the mega-fame that Euphoria has brought, he is now recognised in coffee shops and grocery stores across America. ‘There are more pictures. The reactions from people… It’s sweaty, horny and obsessive. But it’s cool, man.’
And really, it’s not too hard to see why the higher-ups are prepared to keep dishing out second, third, fourth, fifth chances. Fike is beautiful in a way that seems to transcend gender, race, age and sexuality; half-Filipino, half-African-American, babyish features, flowing curls, hint of danger. His music is a hard-to-define mix of pop, rock and rap that feels calculatedly cross-genre. And he is extremely funny too — in a way that feels emblematic of a generational vibe shift away from the clean-eating, clean-thinking millennials who watched Euphoria. ‘Online, everyone is all like: “I had a green juice and told my Black friend I love him!” But then they go and watch a bunch of little kids do drugs and f*** each other because that’s all they’re really thinking about.’
The reactions from people… It’s sweaty, horny and obsessive. But it’s cool, man
When I ask about what sounds like a traumatic childhood, he defies any urge to shape it into a narrative of redemption. He’s clean and sober for the moment, but he doesn’t take that for granted. ‘I’m like a pretty bad drug addict,’ he tells me within a minute of our sitting down. ‘I’m not on drugs now. But I’ll always be a drug addict.’ So it’s fate? ‘It’s genetic.’ He slurps on a cup of cold brew. ‘My mom is a drug addict. My dad is a drug addict. Like really bad, on heroin and stuff. I did drugs from a very young age.’ What age? ‘Ten. I was doing all that bad shit. I was doing coke, I was doing heroin. Ecstasy. F***ing acid. And I never really stopped doing it. It’s kind of like built into me. I just don’t have that self control.’
Would you like to have that self control? ‘I don’t care. I’m happy. I wouldn’t change the fact that I’m addicted to any of that shit. It’s made me better.’ He is, he has noticed, far more resilient than his richer, whiter friends from back home. He grew up in Naples, Florida, a seaside town full of white retirees, where his family counted as ‘eye-sores’. His mother, Jessica, had persistent problems with heroin and spent much of Fike’s childhood in jail. His father, David, showed up for about a week when he was nine and then disappeared again, stealing his brother’s electric scooter to escape. A succession of stepfather figures were present, too, many of them violent. Fike has one fully biological brother — a fellow musician, Alex, 25, who performs under the name ALX — as well as two older and two younger half-siblings. ‘My mom was this young Filipino woman with a bunch of tattoos who dressed how she wanted, talked how she wanted. And in a town like that, you kind of fell into line.’
Fike stresses that his mother did as well as she could. ‘You know when you’re a heroin addict? Mmm, probably not,’ he says, sizing me up (correctly). ‘You don’t have a job. It’s more like you have quests. And then eventually the quests get darker and darker.’ And she was always supportive — even of the face tattoo, by the way. ‘Even when I was making vulgar rap music, she was like: “This shit is really good!”’’ But he and Alex frequently went hungry and witnessed domestic violence. ‘Things stick with you. Like seeing a grown man putting his whole weight into a small woman, watching her body fly. It really deters you from f***king with another human being. Watching a parent get hit like that.’
This didn’t just happen once, he says. ‘It was a bunch of stepfathers. They were all so abusive. Men are f***ing horrible creatures.’ It helps to explain, he suggests, why his musical tastes tend to the mellow and escapist. His refuge was not initially music but the local skate scene, where he found a replacement family. ‘Skaters just love their friends so much. They don’t give a f*** about anything else, they’re just trying to get to their friends.’ But music gradually assumed more and more importance. He taught himself guitar via YouTube, the skate crew morphed into a rap crew, and soon he had enough local interest to put together a demo tape. Actually, it was more like there was a local drug dealer trying to launder money who gave him $10,000 to buy some equipment and record a demo, he says. But then, disaster.
It was a bunch of stepfathers. They were all so abusive. Men are f***ing horrible creatures
The way Fike tells it, he was throwing a party for Alex, who had just come out of jail, when the police arrived. ‘We’re loopy. And the cops come. And they’re like: “That’s Alex Fike! He’s just been in jail!”’ Alex started to run. The cops gave chase. Dominic saw one of them pull out what he thought was a gun and tripped him up — and ended up charged with assaulting a police officer. Alex meanwhile jumped into a lake and tried to hide underwater, using a reed as a snorkel, like in a cartoon. It was while Fike was under house arrest that the demo tape arrived back from the studio. This was when he made the fatal miscalculation with regard to the drugs test. ‘I’m on so much coke, I’m playing it back thinking: “Oh my god, this is so good.” And they’re like: “You’ve got to do a drug test.” Dude. I immediately failed it. Went straight to jail.’
He stresses that jail wasn’t as horrific as people might imagine for a slight, pretty kid with an aversion to violence. ‘Jail’s not even like that now, you know? Everyone in there has families. They’re people. No one in there wants to catch a rape charge.’ He managed to keep his head down and read: all the Harry Potter books, all the Game of Thrones books, A Short History of Nearly Everything, and a pile of music biographies: Bob Dylan, Anthony Kiedis, Paul McCartney. The fact was, his demo gave him something to get out for.
And when he did get out, it really did happen for him. The tape, Don’t Forget About Me, prompted a bidding war. And in 2018, Fike signed to Columbia records (part of Sony) for a reported $4 million. ‘Me and [Sony Music CEO] Rob Stringer were at the top of the Sony building and I remember, he was like: “No more millions!” We were talking that number up and up. And I go to the bathroom to take a piss from all the champagne and I look at my bank account and I’m like holy shit. It’s hard to believe. I saw it drop into my account.’
If you’re thinking that suddenly having millions of dollars drop into your bank account can be a little destabilising for a drug addict, you’d be right. ‘That f***s you up too. That wasn’t good for my addict brain,’ he says. The first expense was a lawyer for his mother who was in jail. That taken care of, he did precisely what you can imagine a self-described dipshit addict would do with it: ‘That was my relationship with money. You use it to have the best time you can. I was bouncing off the walls, man. I was really f***ing up. That Euphoria audition? That wasn’t even close to my biggest f*** up.’
I was bouncing off the walls, man. I was really f***ing up. That Euphoria audition? That wasn’t even close to my biggest f*** up
It’s fair to say that Columbia’s investment did not immediately pay off. Fike had high-profile social media endorsements from Kourtney Kardashian and DJ Khaled; collaborations with Justin Bieber and Paul McCartney were lined up; there were a flurry of articles around 2019 about the mysterious guitar-playing rapper who ‘embodies the hazy, genre-less future of popular music’, as The New Yorker put it.
However, it’s fair to say that it’s Euphoria that changed things for him. When I remark that it has defined a generation, he seems truly humbled. ‘That’s tight, when people say that to me. There’s shit that does that — Dawson’s Creek and shit — and I’m like damn that’s one of them? And I’m in it for a brief minute? How nuts is that?’
His fellow cast members have helped him out too. He recalls chartering a yacht early on in the filming process with his then-girlfriend Schafer and 15-20 girls he had met on Instagram. ‘I just knew a lot of people at that point. I could invite 30 to 50 anywhere at any point. Let’s go to the Waldorf. I’ll buy all the drinks. I’ve got a mound of coke. We’ll go to the Edition. You know what I mean? Psychopath shit.’ Anyway, Schafer told him that this was not cool anymore. ‘She was like: “You can’t do this shit after the show comes out.” And she was right. You can’t.’
If I were in a relationship right now, one or both of the parties would end up getting hurt at some point
He also credits his long-standing manager, Reed Bennett, for sticking by him. ‘We have an understanding. I tell him, I can’t do this shit. And if I ever try to convince you otherwise, it’s a lie. Don’t listen to me. I’m manipulative!’ For the moment, then, he’s on nothing harder than cold-brew and cigarettes. His mother is doing okay too. ‘There’s a weird thing about taking care of your parents,’ he says. ‘When you’re paying your parents’ rent? You can do what the f*** you want. I could go and smoke crack in front of my mom and she can’t say shit, you know, or I’m taking away her f***ing Netflix.’ He’s being affectionate. His latest single is not called ‘Mama’s Boy’ for nothing.
Coming up, there’s the new album, plus an indie movie, Little Death, alongside Talia Ryder and David Schwimmer. But his fantasy is to move out into the mountains, to strum a guitar on a porch in a landscape that is about as far removed from swampy Florida as it’s possible to be. ‘I’d like a wife in a paisley dress doing dishes in a bucket. I would love that. In jail, I would read about McCartney and that ranch he had over in Scotland. I would read that in jail and I’d close my eyes and I’d be like, “Take me there”.’ The wife will have to wait for the moment. ‘If I were in a relationship right now, one or both of the parties would end up getting hurt at some point.’ That sounds very responsible, I say. ‘Maybe!’ he laughs. ‘Maybe I’m just bullshitting.’
