Tell Me Lies fans rejoice! Season 2 will premiere on Hulu September 4th.
Created and executive produced by Meaghan Oppenheimer and based on the novel by Carola Lovering, the show follows Baird college student Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and her highly dysfunctional romance with master manipulator Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White). At the end of Season 1, Lucy was left reeling from a tangled web of lies, and the many resulting broken relationships with fellow students. Season 2 begins with Lucy’s return to college, where she is trying to block Stephen out, only of course, it’s not that simple.
Lucifer star Tom Ellis will join the cast as Oliver, a professor married to Lucy’s teacher Marianne (Gabriella Pession); Leo (Thomas Doherty, Gossip Girl), a student returning from abroad, will take an interest in Lucy, and fans will get to see many of the dangling threads from Season 1 be tied up. Deadline chatted with Oppenheimer, Van Patten and White about what we can expect from Season 2, how the actors handled embodying toxicity, and what they’d like to see happening to their characters in the future, plus one juicy idea from the writers’ room that didn’t make it into the show.
Van Patten also revealed how her new Amanda Knox project is going—she will play Knox in a Hulu limited series executive produced by Knox herself.
DEADLINE: Meaghan, Season 2 goes beyond the scope of the book by Carola Lovering. What did you have in mind going into this? What did you know you wanted to do with it?
MEAGHAN OPPENHEIMER: When I pitched the show originally—it’s probably three years ago now—I had to write a pretty thorough, serious format that had possibilities for later seasons. And I hadn’t broken the second season yet, but I had said they will probably be apart at this point. We want to see Lucy and Stephen separate and still destroying each other. So I knew that I wanted them destroying each other from far away. And I knew I wanted to go deeper into the rest of the ensemble. But then when we actually got green-lit, I just do a lot of sitting alone in a room and thinking about what the craziest thing I can think of is. And obviously the room was very productive and we had a lot of time. We probably spent the first three weeks just shooting out any crazy idea that anyone had. And it’s a very free room with no judgment because people are sharing a lot of their own personal, intimate, f—ed up stories. So you get to know everyone very, very well, very quickly.
JACKSON WHITE: Can we have a sit and talk about the stuff that was rejected? Because I want to know.
OPPENHEIMER: Yeah. I can tell you one thing [from the writers’ room] that was rejected was a threesome scene with you and Wrigley [Spencer House], and I was like, I’m not…
DEADLINE: That’s so good! But you balance the twistiness with believability. That’s a delicate balance to push it to the point where people are always constantly surprised.
OPPENHEIMER: I really think that the s–t that people do to each other in real life is usually crazier than the stuff we can make up. And so I find that just pulling on real-life experiences of mine, or friends of mine, or other people and just cranking it up a notch, because I think the things that shocked the audience the most the first season, it wasn’t the big murder stuff, it wasn’t death, it was the things that people recognized in their own lives. Your boyfriend leaving a party with someone else. That’s happened to a lot of people.
DEADLINE: Grace and I talked about this last season, about how important it is to accurately portray coercive control, and to portray it in a way that it doesn’t happen among people who are submissive or somehow culpable. It happens to anyone and everyone. There’s no characteristic of a person that’s more likely to get sucked into that. I think that’s what’s liberating watching the show is that we all feel vindicated for the times that we believed people.
OPPENHEIMER: I think people are really good liars in general. I think most people, if they really need to, can lie convincingly to someone. And so I think, yeah, everyone can be pretty fooled.
DEADLINE: Jackson and Grace, how did you cope with the heaviness of embodying these stories? Grace, I know last season you said, “When I was done with Lucy I dyed my hair because it was so much to live in her.”
VAN PATTEN: Well, I think the first season was heavy, and I didn’t expect myself to be as pulled into it as I was. And I have never done a second season of anything, so I think I was expecting that same heaviness and fear, but I think I just had it in my body already, and I just had to ignite it as opposed to go there, and find it, and tap into scary parts of myself and expose them. So it was less of a process and more of just a continuation of what we all established in the beginning, which was really comforting and something I was afraid had gone away forever. But once everyone was together again and we were in our crazy 2007 clothes, and the frat parties, it kind of all just clicked back. But I mean, it’s heavy, but it didn’t f— me up. Also, Lucy is in so much denial this season, that that is probably what I was in. That’s the emotion I took from it. All right, I’ve got to go into this girl’s mind again and I’m going to be OK. So maybe I’m not, I don’t know.
DEADLINE: Jackson, what about you? One of the things I love about the Stephen character is it’s not simplified. He does these terrible things and he’s obviously a disordered personality, but we also understand some of him because we’ve met his mum [played by White’s real-life mother Katey Sagal]. And I think that the way that generational behavior plays out is fascinating. We can see that he’s in pain and he has redeeming qualities because of how he is with his sister.
WHITE: That’s the perfect way to understand him is that episode last season, I’m so grateful for that episode.
DEADLINE: Where he goes home for the holidays in Season 1 and we meet his mom?
WHITE: Yeah. Just that dynamic. I thought Meaghan just lined that up so accurately and it just gave me a total fuel for what’s going on with him. But it was kind of like what Grace said, I’ve never done a Season 2 either. And I was really nervous to show back up and do it. And I remember the first day the cameras were on us and I was sweating, I was really nervous, I was like, oh, how do I do this guy again? He’s so locked up, and mysterious, and what’s going on with him, and how do I f—ing play that? And then it kind of just worked in the favor of the story because Stephen is trying to figure out if he’s a good person, or if he’s a bad person, or if he’s done bad things. That’s his wrestling match this season. And all the nerves I had about that influenced it. I was able to just be in my head about that. That was just the question going the whole time is, am I a sociopath? Did I make a mistake? Just that inner monologue.
DEADLINE: In preparing for Season 2, did you work with your mom at all off-screen to build that backstory? Because I imagine that could have been helpful.
WHITE: Yeah, I didn’t have to prep anything. It was really potent. It was there. But yeah, like I said, it influences everything. That’s enough for him to go nuts. She was great in that.
OPPENHEIMER: I have to say, I think Grace and Jackson are both so brilliant in the sense that, at least it appears from where I am, you guys don’t do a ton of planning. Your emotional and mental availability just when you show up to do a scene, it feels like I don’t know what they’re going to do. And it’s always unexpected and I think that’s why it’s so real and they both make it look a lot easier than it is.
WHITE: I do think Grace and I work really similarly.
VAN PATTEN: Yeah. I think it’s a lot of just reacting to each other. Also, it’s so interesting to hear you say that was Stephen’s battle in his head, because I think that was Lucy’s too. And it’s interesting that they have the same feelings about themselves and going through the same thing simultaneously, but not connecting over it, actually doing the opposite. They’re both trying to either redeem themselves, or figure out who they are and are they doing the right thing, and they just do it in a completely different way.
DEADLINE: Did either of you do any reading about personality disorders or this kind of behavior?
WHITE: I think everyone’s got s–t. Everyone’s got something that they have to constantly look at and work on. And I think a lot of this job in any role or any capacity is just substituting some similarity that you have and translating it into who this is and just understanding both of those things. I think it’s like you have to understand a character, then you have to also understand yourself, and then you kind of combine the two.
VAN PATTEN: So these two people, Lucy and Stephen who are both mentally unwell, they don’t know that.
WHITE: That’s true.
VAN PATTEN: And I doubt either of them go to therapy or examine themselves. They don’t see themselves as sick or toxic, which is interesting because that’s why there’s a show, they keep repeating the same things and they keep hurting each other in the same way, and they don’t look within themselves. It’s constantly at each other and not trying to understand each other.
WHITE: I feel like everyone thinking about their early 20s… I look back at it and I go, oh, I was completely not… Do you think back at it and it’s almost like a dream? I wasn’t thinking about anything. All those things happened and it’s kind of like this old movie playing and you’re like, wow, I can’t believe I did that. I can’t believe I said thiS. And this is a show where we’re playing the people in that time period of not really examining anything that’s going on. We’re just moving.
OPPENHEIMER: And hyper-fixating on the wrong things. Because for me at that age, I was definitely very aware, but simultaneously completely unaware. And I lived in such a tiny bubble of my own reality that I think a lot of people, it’s just very easy to act like a very terrible person and not realize the people you’re affecting outside of it. Also, it’s the first age where consequences matter. Up until that point, it’s like everything can be fixed, everything’s temporary, but once you get to 19, you start to make mistakes that have lasting effects on your life and other people’s lives. And that realization of like, oh, s–t these mistakes actually count and I might not be able to fix them. That, I think certainly for me, and I think for a lot of young people, is a rude awakening when you realize that.
DEADLINE: What can you tease for the viewers for this season in terms of story?
OPPENHEIMER: We’ve talked a lot about this season being more of a war story than a love story. And I think that Lucy is a lot more full of rage this season, but simultaneously really, really, really pushing it down. And so I think that the back and forth of them trying to hurt each other is really fun and really exciting. And we definitely go into the rest of the friend group a lot more and the ramifications. Lucy and Stephen are the root of all the disaster really, but we see this season how all of those mistakes that they made, and lies that they told, and things that they did with each other have impacted all of their friends. We get to know everyone, I think, a lot more closely.
DEADLINE: What were some scenes or elements that were really challenging to bring together?
VAN PATTEN: A lot of them!
WHITE: A lot of them.
VAN PATTEN: Yeah, it’s hard, because each scene is so loaded and so tense, and the challenge of trying to track that and make sure it’s this trackable evolution of the journey of these people was the hardest part, for me at least. Because Lucy starts out completely in denial and slowly it starts to seep out of her pores until she can’t push it down anymore. Similarly to last season, but last season she kind of came in strong, bold, and she got cracked down piece by piece by Stephen. So this is kind of a similar downfall, but just two different emotions, and trying to make sure that that made sense with each scene and that it was going somewhere was probably the most challenging part.
WHITE: You played denial better than anyone. It’s so cool. You really do.
VAN PATTEN: Thanks. Thanks a lot.
WHITE: No, really though, the first part of this season when you’re just not going to think about it, and then the rage starts seeping through, it’s just genius.
VAN PATTEN: Oh, that was the most challenging scene. When we first see each other in the first episode [of Season 2].
WHITE: I love that one.
VAN PATTEN: I love it so much, but it’s so subtle. Just if you read that scene, you could swap this out with friends. It’s so subtextual that the pressure of trying to get across a million emotions with this person, but keeping it leveled in a way, and not reacting too much, and not showing my cards too much. It was just complicated.
WHITE: Yeah, that’s the anxiety you feel when you watch this show too. To have straightforward dialogue and then you just have to paint it. You know what I mean? And then you have to put the undercurrent under it. I was telling Meaghan yesterday, I don’t know another show that makes my stomach feel the way that this one does. It’s awesome.
OPPENHEIMER: It makes people uncomfortable. Yeah. I think, that was a hard scene. You guys were so great in it, but it was a really… I remember that day, I think it felt like a lot of pressure for everyone because it was also one of the later scenes we had shot and it was like, oh, this is the moment. This is the moment. And I feel like we didn’t want it to be over the top, but didn’t want it to be anticlimactic. And like you said, that you’re conveying so much without saying any of it. And we had stripped down that scene too, because initially it was way more, not on the nose, but straightforwardly mean. And then we ended up stripping back the dialogue so that it was very sparse. And I think that was a good call. But yeah, editing that scene was fun because you could edit it in 10 different ways. Do they hate each other? Do they love each other?
VAN PATTEN: Wow. Yes. Is she OK? No, no she’s not. And then she walks away. You don’t know how either of them is feeling.
DEADLINE: Meaghan, what would you ideally achieve with a third season? What’s the dream?
Oh, man. It’s hard to… I have ideas of what I would want to do, but it’s hard to say without giving away the end of the season. I would say I think there needs to be blood. Not literal blood. I think that a lot of people are rightfully very distraught at the end of this season, and I think some revenge needs to happen, or justice. There’s some justice that needs to be served. Just keeping it as exciting and surprising. And what I liked about this season was that it felt, to me at least, more emotionally vulnerable. And it kind of got at my gut in a different way this season, and it hit some sadder notes for me, which I liked. And so I think keeping the vulnerability that we found this season along with all of the toxic excitement and anxiety.
DEADLINE: Jackson and Grace, if you had your dream, what would you have your characters do in the future?
WHITE: Something so cool. I want Meaghan to make me just a, I don’t know, a superhero or something.
DEADLINE: I feel like Stephen would be sociopathic CEO, or maybe he’s even a politician running for office.
OPPENHEIMER: Oh, that’s terrifying. He would do so well though.
WHITE: Yeah, I know.
DEADLINE: What about you Grace, what would Lucy be doing?
VAN PATTEN: She would get into witchcraft and Voodoo and she has a Voodoo doll of Stephen, and she’s totally great in real life, but at night she comes home and stabs him.
OPPENHEIMER: You guys.
WHITE: I would love for a threesome with Wrigley maybe.
OPPENHEIMER: We can definitely talk about it.
DEADLINE: Grace, you have a new Amanda Knox show coming up and she’s an executive producer. How are you feeling about it? What stage are you at?
VAN PATTEN: It’s so early, but I am so excited and so terrified, and I can’t even really believe that it’s happening.
OPPENHEIMER: Have you gone to meet her yet?
VAN PATTEN: I’ve met her once, and I hope to hang out with her more. She’s so, so fascinating. I’m excited to talk about it more when I know more.
Tell Me Lies Season 2 premieres on Hulu with the first two episodes on September 4th.
