Spoilers ahead for the We Were Liars season 1 ending, now streaming on Prime Video.
Emily Alyn Lind remembers the first time she was screwed over in Hollywood. “But I'm not going to tell you about it,” the 23-year-old We Were Liars star says over coffee at the Plaza Hotel, her low voice almost drawling.
She was pretty young at the time — Lind has been acting for more than 17 years at this point — and it involved someone previously on her team, likely years ago.
“I came out of the room kicking and screaming with my mind made up, super stubborn person,” she recalls. “I’m a bit blunt, when I have to be. I don't have a problem with looking someone in the eyes and saying, ‘You f*cked up.’ And I didn't have a problem doing that when I was small either.” That was “daunting” to people, she says, even her family. “I'm like, ‘Dudes do it. Watch me.’”
She wonders if she was cooler then, more fearless. Youthful bravery gets beaten out of you as you grow up, especially if you’re a girl. But it might have been more like “fake confidence,” she muses, not built in anything solid, not earned. As a kid, she always wanted to take the shortcut, the way child actors can — on set, you magically become an adult, or at least have to act like one. Professional, rule-abiding, mature. Learn early to expect that people will lie to you. Don’t trust anyone too much. Don’t give away your vulnerability to anyone but the audience.
“Then I realized that I was losing a lot of the important stuff in my life,” she says. “[I was trying to] slide by without being caught by life, by whatever god you might pray to. It stopped working.”
Lind quotes, almost offhand, the Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chödrön: "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is truly indestructible in ourselves be found." Or: you have to open yourself up over and over again, despite knowing you might be safer otherwise, despite knowing there will be pain, in order to grow.
It’s a 75-degree day in New York City, but Lind’s outfit indicates she hasn’t yet left the hotel lobby this morning: a long black blazer overcoat down to her ankles, a silk skirt, and stompy scuffed Doc Marten platforms, blonde hair in a messy bun. She looks around the Plaza’s cafe and reminisces about filming an episode of Gossip Girl here, several years ago.
She thinks people might consider that her “big break,” starring in the rebooted series that lasted two seasons on HBO Max, playing the sardonic Upper East Side rich kid Audrey Hope (one-third of the show’s most enthralling relationship: Audrey, Evan Mock’s Aki, and Thomas Doherty’s Max).
“I've been doing this since I was five years old, but that was the first time that I felt real, bigger-than-life, fame-ish stuff,” she says.
The daughter of One Tree Hill actress Barbara Alyn Woods and producer and assistant director John Lind, Lind grew up seeing the work of acting, not just the glamour. She’d watch her mom leave for set, often traveling far from their home in Los Angeles. (OTH filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina.)
“My dad was working too, but a lot of my memories [are] with my mother leaving my dad [to stay] back with us,” Lind says, referring to her two sisters, Natalie and Alyvia, who are also actresses. “[My mom is] the hardest working woman I know, so that shaped a lot of who I am. I always had women in my life that were hard workers. They were always busy and they never stayed at home. They always had their own careers, own money, own everything. They were really badasses.”
Her first screen role was in The Secret Life of Bees, playing a younger version of Dakota Fanning’s character. She picked up prestige projects — as Shirley Temple in J.Edgar, for example — as well as kids movies (Dear Dumb Diary), horror flicks, and daytime soaps. In her teens, she nabbed roles in Netflix’s The Babysitter and its sequel, and in Mike Flanagan’s thriller Doctor Sleep.
Lind learned early on that this career and her public perception were unpredictable. “You're someone someday, and then people forget about you, and then you're back to someone the next day,” she says. “I realized how shallow and stupid that was so early on — none of this other stuff matters as long as you're doing what you love.”
That’s part of why she isn’t too torn up about Gossip Girl’s untimely cancellation at this point. “I think it had run its course, to be honest,” she says. “I was sad for sure, because I really enjoyed the people a lot and I was best friends with the cast. And I loved living in New York … But it opened up the other doors for other stuff.”
It’s also why she doesn’t really buy the idea of a big break, or at least how other people might see hers. Her turning points were smaller moments of realizing Oh, I still love this, after all this time. Getting to travel, to live in London for a time, to work with creators like Flanagan, to write her own projects (she’s written a movie and a series and is in the process of figuring out how to make them) and maybe soon, direct them.
Lind is not on social media and barely uses her phone. She explains that it’s mostly a skill issue — though she doesn’t use that phrase because she’s not Online — not an attempt to seem cool or an intentional way of maintaining her attention span. She is one of the few 23-year-olds on the planet who can’t bring herself to learn how to use the thing. “It stresses me out,” she says. What does she do instead? “Talking,” she smiles. “Watching movies. I mean, I'm still on the TV a lot. I am not perfect.”
But movies are her biggest passion. She watches one almost every day and tries to go to the theater a couple times a week, depending on her schedule. As a kid, her grandfather kept Turner Classic Movies on, exposing her to the classics. (“Bette Davis established so much of my personality, I feel like, just a total badass who just wasn't afraid to speak up.”) She loves musicals (The Sound of Music is another personality-definer) and horror films, and has a special appreciation for pre-Hays Code films, before censorship and gender role regression kicked in, when people could do anything. (“Five years later, men and women had to sleep in two separate beds on screen.”) She loves Lauren Bacall, silent movies, the 1950 film noir In a Lonely Place, the Coen Brothers’ 2001 neo-noir The Man Who Wasn't There.
In her early teens, she became as obsessed, if not more, with who created the movies she was watching as she was who starred in them. How did they choose those cameras, what’s special about a specific angle or scene, how did it all come together? It was a literal perspective shift from her experience as an actor, especially as a stubborn kid with a clear sense of self and many opinions — directing embodied a sense of control, voice, power.
“Acting, excuse my French, feels like prostitution sometimes. You know what I mean?” Lind asks. When I laugh instinctively, she’s stern. “No, I'm serious. It just feels like sometimes you're just being paraded around like a f*cking puppet. Sometimes I just wish I could be on the other side of that. Because it can get quite tiring.”
“I never thought that that was something I could do,” she continues. “I just always thought, I can only act. I put myself in that box, and I'm still not out of the idea of just trying to let myself be okay with the fact that, sure, I might royally screw up. Be the worst damn director of all time and make the worst movie to ever go out and ruin cinema forever for everyone. No, I'm kidding. It's because it feels that dramatic in my head… I love acting. I want to continue to act and work with people that I really love. But I know that in the end, I really want to be more a part of making this stuff.” She thinks directing might be the great love of her life.
You can hear that desire in how Emily Alyn Lind talks about making We Were Liars. In the new Prime Video drama series adapted from E. Lockhart’s popular 2014 YA novel, she plays Cadence Sinclair Eastman, the oldest granddaughter in a Kennedy-esque dynasty that summers on their private Martha’s Vineyard compound Beechwood Island. She’s one of four best friends, the titular Liars — her cousins Mirren (Esther McGregor) and Johnny (Joseph Zada), and family friend Gat (Shubham Maheshwari). The show explores the family dynamics in the aristocratic Sinclairs and the greed that patriarch Harris (David Morse) has sown in his descendants; it’s part commentary on privilege and obscene wealth, part coming-of-age story.
In the last scenes of the show, Cadence realizes the truth about what happened to her during the summer she was 16 years old. The twist ending is that Mirren, Johnny, and Gat are all dead; Cadence has been talking to them as if they’re alive, her brain trying to protect her from the trauma of realizing they perished in a fire that was her idea to start. She thought burning down the family home would cleanse her family of its sins; instead, it destroys the people she loves most.
Filming the very last scene, Lind knew she wanted the shot to be a “oner,” a long take of Cady running down the beach, having made her choice to leave her family behind.
“I wasn’t supposed to run the whole way, the whole beach. But I did. And it felt so good, actually,” she says. “I was talking to the drone operator, and I was like, ‘We should just get right in front of her face.’ I remember I was just running down the beach and it was really far. Then I actually jumped into the boat and took off on it for real. And there was something so magical about that and so real, after all the time and effort and love and energy that was put into the show, there was something really special.”
She’s not sure about a potential sequel; the show ends on something of a cliffhanger. Mirren and Gat have accepted their deaths and apparently passed on, but Johnny is sticking around to haunt his mom (Mamie Gummer). There’s also a prequel novel, Family of Liars, where Lockhart focuses on the parents’ generation as teenagers. But Lind does think there’s more to explore with Cady’s storyline, too.
“[I saw where] someone said, like, Cadence wiped her hands clean,” Lind says. “And I'm like, not at all really. I mean, she’s literally just doing the bare minimum for what just happened… The main thing that I think about is that the conversation with her and Harris before she does get on that boat is that he says, ‘If you don't stick with us, then I'm going to out what you did. I'm going to tell everyone what you did.’ There's things that he can use over me for the rest of my life. People died. That's a lot of baggage that she's leaving with. She's not leaving with her hands clean. Her hands have never been dirtier. None of her family knows.”
Plus, she’s still at the beginning of understanding her family’s history, their implicit and explicit perpetuation of classism, racism, and colonization. Reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in a cozy hammock in the sun isn’t going to cut it.
“I don't think that that's something that can be learned overnight just because someone says it,” Lind says. “She really believes what Gat says. But I think that that's some deep-rooted sh*t right there… She was definitely blissfully unaware for way too long. In her head at a certain point she realizes, okay, well, even my idea that I could fix this the way I thought I was going to fix it was probably the most privileged thing that I've ever said… This character has a lot of flaws. She can be a narcissist sometimes. She can have a massive ego.”
After all, this is a girl who has grown up hearing advice from her mother to keep her chin up, her back straight, to “make her heart a small target,” to avoid showing how you feel, or even feeling much at all. The vulnerability of it could kill you.
Still, it’s what the Liars seem to regret most — especially Johnny and Mirren — when they talk about their deaths. That lack of openness, of admitting to mistakes, of having grace for other people. The possibility for their growth is over. The plot arc is finished. Death is the end of trying to be a better person.
“When you're a kid, you just feel like you're so invincible,” Lind says. “That's something that slowly but surely does go away.” She’s not afraid to die, really. “Some important people have died in my life recently. Seeing that happen, the less scary it gets, I guess, because it just feels like, well, if they've done it, I can do it. I'm not going to do it as early as they have.”
Around 14, she wrote a bio for the Instagram she never uses. She’s never changed it. It reads, “can’t wait to get wrinkles.”
“That was always something that was supposed to stand for the idea of, I think wrinkles or bruises are signs of a good time, or a sign of living, a sign of life, which is a beautiful thing. Experience,” she says. Little markers of time, of letting people in, letting them hurt you or heal you or something in between. Letting them screw you over, and standing on your own anyway — ideally with the support of the women who made you who you are.
“But now I have a couple wrinkles,” Lind says cheekily, “and I'm like, ‘I gotta change that. I don't want them anymore.’”
