The season 2 finale of Tell Me Lies is officially streaming on Hulu and to celebrate, I’m dropping my spoiler-filled interviews with Grace Van Patten, Jackson White, Sonia Mena, Alicia Crowder, Branden Cook, Spencer House, and Thomas Doherty.
Tell Me Lies Season 2 picks up as Lucy Albright (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen DeMarco (Jackson White) return to college, not speaking after their dramatic breakup at the start of the summer. Yet while very much at odds, they find themselves in a new version of their addictive dynamic – which is as infuriating as it is inescapable. Meanwhile, the story expands deeper into the lives of Lucy and Stephen’s friend group, as the fallout from Season One impacts all of their lives in unexpected ways.
“It was so exciting. I had never done it before, I’ve never gotten to do a season two of anything,” Van Patten explained about the opportunity to reprise her role. “So, initially it was a lot of nerves and the fear of, is Lucy completely out of me and will I be able to find her again? But once we read the scripts and once we were back on set and I was in those 2008 low-rise jeans, it clicked back in a way that was really comforting and [it was] really fun to do a season with Jackson where it was a completely different dynamic, similar, but rooted in anger and war as opposed to lust and desire, and that was a different approach.”
White agreed, adding, “It was so fun to do an opposite thing. Yeah, I’ve never done a second season or anything like that, so it was really cool. And the jeans, the jeans played a big part in getting us back into the headpace. They do, you squeeze into those Lucky brands, and all of a sudden, you’re back in action.”
In the 2015 timeline, Pippa and Diana are going strong, but there’s still so much story to tell about how their relationship got to that point. “I hope we get to see how it starts,” Mena expressed. “Then, I hope we just get to see more of us and the nuances of like, there is so much goodness and positivity in the relationship, but no relationship is perfect and I think understanding more of the depth of their relationship would be fun. But I think it’d just be so fun to see how did this happen?”
“I think neither of them are super in touch with or aware of their sexuality either,” Crowder commented. “So, they have to figure that out while also coming together and like, how does that all play out and develop?”
“Sometimes I don’t like it,” House said of the time jump. “To me, I think it’s kind of fun to see, ‘Oh, can Wrigley get out of this? Can he find a healthy path forward?’ And he will not, because we’ve seen him in the present day, and he does not. So, I don’t really always love it but it also can be very interesting to, you know, you could look at it a different way and be like, well, how does he get that low? And we’re finding that out for him, he’s finding out.”
“I think I liked it for the same reason that you’re saying though, Spencer,” Cook continued. “It looks all good ‘cause for the most part, until we got the scripts and stuff, it wasn’t really clear [that] the wedding was gonna potentially just be destroyed. So I was like, ‘Oh, okay, he ends out okay,’ and obviously, there’s little things here and there but I’m like, ‘Oh, okay, so I know that somehow, some way, they figure it out.’ And then, it’s interesting, ‘cause you’re building up to something that’s a cliffhanger that then you build up to something else that’s also a cliffhanger. So it’s interesting to kind of plan the duality of the two because I guess when you’re playing it, and when you are shooting it, you obviously can’t play the end.”
While we don’t see Leo in 2015, Doherty told me, “I want to see him again.” I also had to ask him if he believed things would have been different for his character and Lucy if he hadn’t beaten up Stephen in the season finale. “I mean, if it wasn’t that, I think it would have been something else,” the actor shared. “I think she’s so trapped with him, psychologically. He’s really got her but if it wasn’t that, it would have been something else.”
We discussed that insane cliffhanger, their hopes for a third season, the experience of reprising their roles, all of the different relationships, and more.
Watch my interviews below:
