Yahoo Lifestyle Everybody's Talking About "Tell Me Lies" — Here Are 17 BTS Facts About The Show You Probably Didn't Know
🚨Warning: There are MASSIVE spoilers ahead!🚨
1.Tell Me Lies is based on Carola Lovering's 2018 novel. The book is told from dueling POVs between Lucy and Stephen, and readers see how toxic and controlling Stephen truly is. This was changed slightly for the series because creator Meaghan Oppenheimer admitted she still wanted to make Stephen seem likable.
“He has to walk such a fine line and he’s going to be polarizing, no matter who you cast in this role. Not everyone is gonna like him and they shouldn’t. But getting everyone on board with the idea, being like, not everyone’s gonna like the lead character, is a little scary for some people to hear from a writer,” she told Variety.
2.Meaghan added that the "fine line" Stephen walks between was "probably the thing we talked about most in the writers room," too. They wanted to make him seem realistic and make sure his abuse wasn't glamorized either.
“We don’t want to glamorize an abusive character because he is abusive at times. We also can’t hate him," she said. "He’s our male lead. I think it was just about being honest and being realistic and not making anything too heightened or too ridiculous. In real life, people do some really bad things, and the key was to try to understand why he does the things that he does and at any point to understand his motivation."
She also explained that the TV version of Stephen deals with a lot of deep rooted insecurity. "I think the Stephen that we created is coming from such a place of fear," she said. "Our Stephen is really terrified of a lot of things and when you are terrified, you treat everyone like an enemy. You treat your enemies badly. It was hard. There were some scenes where we went way too far, and we were like, we’ve gotta bring it back."
3.Jackson White and Grace Van Patten, who play Stephen and Lucy, are dating in real life. They first met over Zoom during the chemistry read for the series.
4.Grace became extremely close with her onscreen besties Cat Missal and Sonia Mena, who play Bree and Pippa. One of Grace's favorite on-set memories was eating entire boxes of Crumbl cookies with them each week.
Grace is a MASSIVE fan of Crumbl cookies. "You'd eat nine Crumbl cookies in the dark," Jackson joked with her. "That was pretty much every Friday," Grace added.
5.Tom Ellis, who plays Oliver, is married to Tell Me Lies' creator, Meaghan Oppenheimer, in real life. She said she cast him in the role because she knew Cat would be "safe" with him.
"It wasn't initially my idea [to cast him]," Meaghan told Deuxmoi. "We had the idea of Oliver; we hadn't started writing the scripts yet, but we had the kind of pitch of the season, and someone else suggested him. And at first, I was like, I don't think he's gonna want to do it. And then I couldn't get it out of my head. ... I just asked him about it, and he was like, 'Well, what's the character?' So I talked him through it. It's very different than any part he's ever played and so far from him as a person that he was excited to do it."
"It was really nice having someone I trusted in that role," she added. "It was so much to ask of Cat, you know, who plays Bree. You don't know who you're gonna get if you bring in some new actor who's 20 years older than the cast. And I knew that with Tom, Cat would be safe."
6.Tom revealed that he had to "disassociate" and "desensitize" himself from the character because he'd go home, think about Oliver's actions, and "get sick" to his stomach.
"It was only when I sort of finished the work, and I went home and really thought about Oliver's actions that I really felt sick to my stomach. I had to kind of disassociate a little bit and desensitize in order to play this," he said. "You look at it in retrospect and yeah, there is an element of grooming that happens here. He does know better. This person — without even knowing the nuances of Bree's character — they are in a vulnerable position in their life, they're younger, they're in education. He knows better. I had to sort of forget all of that in order to do it."
7.Meaghan sought to make sure that every single sex scene in the show "served a purpose," especially because some are "upsetting sex scenes or awkward." Dr. Tiffanie Henry works as the series' intimacy coordinator.
"No one was ever even slightly pushed to do something they didn’t want to do," Meaghan said. "It was always a conversation and making sure everyone felt really comfortable and really safe. We really rehearsed everything out so there were no surprises on the day. It’s like a dance, you have to choreograph it and it’s actually quite mechanical when you get down to it."
8.Tom explained that this series is the first time he's worked with an intimacy director. "I was really appreciative of having that as a facility now," he told Us Weekly. "Because these are uncomfortable scenes to shoot as a performer."
"The sex in this show is not meant to be gratuitous. It's not meant to be there just for the sake of ‘And now [the characters] have sex.’ It's part of the conversation," he added.
9.Jackson explained that while filming intimate scenes, they use a rubber ball or some other tool and place it between the actors so they aren't actually touching.
"You put a little rubber ball between your hips, and then it looks like there’s thrusting, but there’s actually a rubber ball in between you," he explained to Entertainment Tonight. "Sometimes you use that, sometimes you don’t. ...There's all kinds of junk."
10.At the beginning of Season 2, we get the plot twist that Pippa and Diana have started dating in the 2015 timeline. Meaghan said that she never told the network about the huge reveal and just sent them the script. That night, she got texts from shocked executives jokingly saying, "You're sick. You're a menace."
"I didn't tell the network about this reveal when I sent the script to them. And as they were starting to read it that night, over several hours I was just getting all these text messages from our executives that were like, 'What the fuck?'" she said. "They were like, 'You're sick. You're a menace.'"
11.It was Meaghan's idea to have Jackson's actual mom, Katey Sagal, guest star as Stephen's mom. She shared that before pitching it to the studio she asked Jackson if he was okay with it first. Then, on the day of filming, Jackson said he didn't realize how "challenging" it'd be to act beside his mom.
"But I knew I had to — before I pitched it to the studio or network — had to pitch it to Jackson first," Meaghan said. "I didn't want to put him in an uncomfortable situation, so I texted him, and he took a while to respond back, but then he was like, 'That's amazing, I love it.'"
"I did not expect to be so anxious doing it," Jackson said of having his mom there. "I think when she arrived in Atlanta, I realized how in character I was and we'd be doing a scene and she'd be like, 'It was good, it was a good take.' And I'd be like, 'Mom, stop,' It was hard. It was like, fucking, is this a coworker? And we're friends in real life, and it was hard to be so passive-aggressive toward each other."
12.While Tell Me Lies takes place in New York at the fictional Baird College, the series is actually shot in Atlanta. They film the school scenes at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA.
13.During their downtime on set, Jackson and Spencer House, who plays Wrigley, would hang out and play Xbox together. "It was sweet," Jackson said.
14.Because there was so much time off between Seasons 1 and 2, partly due to the WGA and SAG strikes, the actors were able to go into filming with the entire season already written.
Alicia Crowder, who plays Diana, said that it actually helped her map out Diana's arc throughout this season.
15.Before his chemistry read, Thomas Doherty, who plays Leo, asked Grace to meet him for coffee. He said he thought he was "going to meet Lucy" but was surprised at how different Grace is from the character. "That's how good she is at acting," he said.
"If I had to do the my rest of my career working with Grace, I'd be a happy man. She's just an incredible human being, incredible actor, so funny, so smart. And yeah, just a wonderful, wonderful human," he said.
16.Grace shared she was "really, really nervous" about filming the scene in Season 2 where Lucy smashes Stephen's iPhone.
"I was so nervous because how do I do this naturally? How does anybody do this naturally? Would anybody do this?," she said.
17.Finally, the series deliberately uses music to tell the story and show parallels. In Season 1, the song "Heartbeats" is featured in Episode 1 when Lucy and Jackson have their first moments together and again in Episode 5 when they reconnect on Christmas. Meaghan revealed this parallel was actually an accident, and two different editors chose those versions of the songs.
Meaghan explained, "We have a few musical moments that are, sort of, where we bring things back that I was really excited to play around with. It was fun because I had two different editors for those episodes, and so one editor put that first version in the restaurant scene ... and when we were looking for songs for the [Episode] 5 scene, that was one of the ones that was suggested. He didn't actually realize it had been in the other episode already. But I thought it was so cool because they're such different versions of the song — one feels so much more fun, and it's the beginning of the relationship, and it's exciting, and it's new, and it's sexy. The second one is quite heartbreaking. I loved how different the same song could feel."
