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When Spencer House first read scripts for Wrigley in Tell Me Lies, he wasn’t sure the role was for him. “It was like another dumb jock,” House tells Teen Vogue with a smile. He was intimately familiar with the archetype, given that he’s around 6’4” and was a former high school football player. One of his first roles, a small part in Madam Secretary in 2016, was literally titled “Douchey Guy.” “I said to my agents, ‘Can you stop sending me this stuff?’ I was like, ‘I'm just so tired of it.’”
Then he saw showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer’s vision for the Hulu drama, which aired its third and final season on Feb. 17. At the beginning of the show, Wrigley is, well, sort of a doofus. He’s a football player at Baird College who is big and brash and drinks too much and makes too many jokes; his friends are either exasperated with his antics or they’re pitying the way he uses his clown veneer to cover a self-destructive streak. By the end of the show, he’s the one character with a true moral code and firm sense of self. He’s grown up, especially after the death of his younger brother. As he tells Bree (Cat Missal) in the finale, “I’m not messy like the rest of this group is. I don’t hurt anyone. I keep my mess contained.”
“Meaghan Oppenheimer brought so much realism and in-depth to this character that I was like, ‘Oh, cool. This is an opportunity to take this cliche that I'm so tired of, and give it life and breathe life into it,’” House says.
It’s a stereotype he lived out as a kid in Plano, Texas, the youngest of three boys with boundless energy and the gift of gab. “I couldn’t shut up,” he says. He’d goof off in class, so teachers sent him to in school suspension, where he sat in silence and the energy bubbled up, just in time to explode once he got back to class and was ready to have fun with his friends again. Back to ISS. “It was a never ending cycle,” one that didn’t give him a ton of confidence in his abilities as a student.
He took up football, maybe as a way to get that energy out, but he never had the quintessential Texas Friday Night Lights dream. House couldn’t quite take it seriously, even when the punishment for clowning around was “absurd cardio drills” that mainly entailed sprinting in 110 degree heat until he puked. “When coaches would scream in my face, spit flying and red in the face and everything, I couldn't not laugh,” he says.
When he got kicked off the team, he took up art. And when art kicked him out, he found himself in theater. It stuck. When someone recommended he try an open cattle call audition for colleges, he thought, why not? He ended up studying acting and “a little bit of opera” at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where he learned a lot—including the fact that school just wasn’t really for him.
“I don't really belong in a school setting, I don't think,” House says, reflecting on his school life from childhood. “I've never flourished. I was either in trouble or I wouldn't really grow.”
A more nomadic, out-in-the-world actor’s life seems like a better fit for House, who moved to New York City after graduation and subsequently went on what felt like thousands of auditions (and received thousands of rejections). He nabbed guest spots in projects like Blue Bloods and The Big Sick, but found his big break in Netflix’s 2019 show The Society, the short-lived but cult-beloved dystopian series about a group of high school students who go missing in an alternate universe of sorts and have to rebuild society from the ground up without their parents, or anyone, around. He plays Clark, who is, you guessed it, a jock.
House is not really on social media—he created an Instagram right as Tell Me Lies ended—but he’s been blown away at how The Society has continued to find an audience years after it was cancelled after just one season. “I'm so amazed by the amount of people who have told me they absolutely loved that show and that it shouldn't have been canceled. And I'm like, ‘Well, well it was, so I guess it is what it is,’” he jokes.
The one thing he laments is that the plot for The Society season 2 would have been so fitting for a post-pandemic world. “I remember talking to creator Chris Keyser about it, and he was like, ‘So there's going to be two warring nations, one that's a peasant nation. And then there's like an economic boom. Because if you have the peasantry, then there's an economic boom for the place. But there was going to be an outbreak of a virus and everyone was going to die. There's going to be a plague problem.’ I was like, ‘Well, that would have been excellent for coming off of COVID.’”
House seems like a roll-with-the-punches kind of guy; he wasn’t too bummed when the show got canceled, choosing instead to focus on the myriad ways it changed his life.
“I met some of my really very close friends on that show, and we're still friends to this day. Jack Mulhern is a very close friend of mine. And also Alex MacNicoll and Emilio Garcia-Sanchez,” he says. “When they were like, ‘You're canceled,’ and everyone was really upset, I was also like, ‘This thing saved me.’”
It also cleared the way for House to play Wrigley, and to create Wrigley’s journey from class clown to leading man on screen.
Oppenheimer was candid from the beginning about where his character would end up. He knew all along that Wrigley and Bree would fall into a relationship because Oppenheimer told him. “My first line in the show, which I kind of threw in there was, ‘I'm stealing your wife,’” he points out. Fans have clocked that line in the aftermath of season 3, with some arguing that it’s proof season 1 writers hadn’t planned the relationship from the beginning—House’s quote would seemingly debunk that.
In the final episode, Wrigley is also heavily implied to be the one who calls Yale to tell them about Stephen (Jackson White) spreading revenge porn.
“Oh, yeah, he did it. He did it,” House confirms. This is another plot point fans have debated online, but House understands why it’s a little bit of a read-between-the-lines moment.
“I remember Meaghan calling me and being like, ‘Did you read that part?’ And it's hard to see it in writing. I didn't get it because it just cuts to a scene of me walking. Meaghan was like, "What do you think about the calling Yale [part]?" And I was like, "I wonder who did it." And she was like, ‘No, you did it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, oh.’”
Wrigley is spurred on to do so after his ex-girlfriend Pippa—played by Sonia Mena, who is also House’s real-life girlfriend— tells him that men like Stephen never face real consequences, and after testing Stephen at the dining hall lunch table about how he talks about Lucy. House loved filming this scene “because Jackson's just so fun to work with,” and it’s a real tipping point in who Wrigley has become as a character. He’s miles away from where he started in season 1, as someone who mainly cared about having a good time.
“Wrigley hasn't known himself,” House says, “and if you don't know yourself, you don't know who your friends are. Now that he's starting to learn who he is, he's starting to see who's his friend and who's not.”
Even in a very serious show, House finds ways to inject some playfulness; he’s still, in some ways, the kid goofing around in the back of class. He loves to improvise—see above—and he found a way to do so throughout the series by playing up the gregarious, popular Wrigley’s vibe on campus.
“Whenever there's an extra walking by or something, I name them the names of my childhood friends. In season one, I was yelling across the fraternity house going, ‘Parker King, Parker King.’ And sure enough, one of my close buddies from back home, Parker King, my phone was ringing when the show came out and he was like, ‘Are you yelling my name in this TV show?’” He’s also thrown out the name Waylon for his 5-year-old nephew, hoping he’ll hear him through the TV screen when his brother is watching. (“Even though he's obviously not going to be watching the show,” House adds.)
For his post-Tell Me Lies career, House has already filmed a comedy pilot called Very Young Frankenstein with Zach Galifianakis and Kumail Nanjiani, which he hopes gets picked up for a full season. Meanwhile, he’s living in between cities, road tripping across the country in his two-door Bronco that he says fits everything he owns. He’s open to wherever life takes him.
“I like making people laugh,” House says. “I hope I continue to do so.”
