Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje kept a pretty big secret from his co-workers during the 9-month shoot of Euphoria season three: He is not, in fact, from Louisiana, but Tilbury, a suburb of Essex, England. Many of his castmates may have only discovered that fact on the press tour. “You have to swim in that realm,” he says over a Zoom call, describing how Method he went with the role of Alamo Brown, the show’s new arms-dealing, human trafficking villain. Akinnuoye-Agbaje is an immersive actor; from the moment he arrived on set, he spoke only in a Southern drawl and asked people to call him by his character’s name, so no one really got to know the real him.

Whatever the sacrifice, it paid off. Though Alamo is perhaps the most outright piece-of-shit character Euphoria creator Sam Levinson has sculpted yet, he’s also fully three-dimensional. Akinnuoye-Agbaje brings a groundedness to the somewhat surreal Western-inspired storyline in this strange new season. We spoke to the actor about creating Alamo, his impressive accent work, and his long history in prestige TV.

GQ: What was it like joining a well-established show this far into the run?

Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje: Coming in, these actors and actresses that had really grown up on the show and you felt that. It felt like they were a family clique. I found that useful coming in as a stranger in terms of the character—it was an interesting dance of exploration and discovery. I remember the very first scene I did, which was with Zendaya and Kadeem Hardison. Sam [Levinson] really does give you license to maneuver between the lines, as great as they are. And as I was doing that, I noticed he was throwing lines at me in mid-scene. And that was new to me. But I noticed nobody else was worried. So I figured this is what they were used to, and this was part of the process. And so I embraced that and found it very useful. And I realized that this is one of the ways that [Levinson’s process] was able to elicit such rich and authentic performances, because it was so fluid.

Do you remember how Alamo was described in the script?

Well, I have to tell you, I did not know that he was a cowboy when I auditioned, because it was still quite secretive. I just had three scenes. So it was only once I landed in LA, Sam asked me, “Can you ride a horse?” And I was like, “No.” So I had to learn to ride a horse in six weeks. Not just ride it, but also with a polo mallet, one-handed. It was quite an intense process, but you cannot play a cowboy without having ridden a horse from my perspective, to authentically be able to give that cowboy swag and to know what the boots, the black hat, what it all means.

And as a young boy growing up in England, watching western films and seeing Black men in those films, it really inspired me. So to be able to emulate some of those performances and be influenced by them was great. I did a lot of research on cowboys and where the term came from and knowing that post-slavery, slaves were called “boy”, and the slaves that herded cattle were called cowboys. And so it was an inimitably derogatory term given to post-slaves before it was made cult and popular in Hollywood. It was very interesting to delve into that history and know that Alamo had sort of sprung from that culture and the Western frontier and pulled himself up by his bootstraps to become the master of his own empire.