Content Warning: This story contains discussions of abusive relationships, domestic violence, substance abuse, and sexual assault in Tell Me Lies. Also, spoilers ahead for Tell Me Lies season 2.
Meaghan Oppenheimer knows audiences can’t resist the dangerous allure of a messy, toxic romance. For three seasons, the showrunner behind Tell Me Lies — the hit Hulu drama that centers on the tumultuous, eight-year entanglement of two college students — has spun a twisted tale about the lifelong ramifications of getting into bed with the wrong person. The end result is one of the rawest, and admittedly most infuriating, depictions of young adulthood in recent memory.
“I think that a lot of shows have flawed characters that are messing up, but still in a way that is easy to idolize,” Oppenheimer tells Teen Vogue during an exclusive visit to the Toronto set in August. “In real life, when you are in a romantic obsession, you are just so belittling of your own happiness and dignity. It can be really humiliating, and I think we show that in a way that you’re told not to in shows. I think a lot of studios or networks are scared to have female characters act pathetic, and the reality is that everyone acts pathetic sometimes.”
Adapted from Carole Lovering’s 2018 novel of the same name and executive produced by Emma Roberts, Tell Me Lies explores the tortured, and often abusive, relationship between Lucy Albright and Stephen DeMarco — played by real-life couple Grace Van Patten and Jackson White — and the ensuing fallout on their coed group of friends.
After meeting at the fictional Baird College in upstate New York in 2008 when she was a freshman and he was a junior, Lucy and Stephen weave in and out of each other’s lives until they reunite at the wedding of their college friends Bree (Catherine Missal) and Evan (Branden Cook) in 2015. While he is engaged to Lucy’s ex-best friend Lydia (Natalee Linez) in the “present day,” Stephen still gets off on manipulating Lucy, knowing that she is still unable to fully cut herself off from him.
Tell Me Lies season 3, which will debut its first two (of eight) episodes on January 13, will find all of the main characters finally reaping what they sowed. “It feels like the stakes of their decisions are much higher; the consequences of their decisions just feel more dangerous,” says executive producer Tyne Rafaeli, who also directed episodes 1, 4, 5 and 8. “They’re entering into dark areas of sexual relationships and psychological relationships that I don’t think this show has seen yet.”
Whereas the sophomore season shifted the central dynamic between Lucy and Stephen at college from a love story to a “war story,” Oppenheimer describes the third installment, which will pick up in January 2009, as more of a “hostage situation.”
By the end of season 2, Lucy, now halfway through her sophomore year, found herself trapped in the same vicious cycle. In the college timeline, after cheating on her then-boyfriend Leo (Thomas Doherty) with Stephen, Lucy has decided to get back together with her ex, stubbornly believing that she can change his destructive behavior. As much as they disapprove, Lucy’s best friends, Bree and Pippa (Sonia Mena), decide to keep their mouths shut.
“Lucy and Stephen know the worst parts about each other, and there’s a f*cked up part about that that makes them feel seen,” Van Patten says. “After two seasons of her not really feeling seen by anybody else in her life, she’s unfortunately willing to take the risk again and hope that it can work out this time. I think she really thinks it’s going to be different this time with him — and that is her biggest mistake.”
Like the audience, Lucy is now left to grapple with the reality that Stephen’s charismatic personality belies his deeply manipulative, and borderline sociopathic, nature. “Jackson is clearly a master at playing all of those levels, so you never really know what is preconceived, what is spur of the moment, what is calculated, what is reactive,” says Rafaeli. (White, to his credit, says that he has always tried to bring a “sense of humor” and “lightness” to the character, even though “he does some really bad things.”)
Given that she has “known a lot of people that would be labeled narcissists” in her own life, Oppenheimer feels a particular sense of empathy for Stephen, even though she does not condone his actions.
“I don’t like to think that most people are just born a certain way. Of course, there are things that are unchangeable in all of us, but I do think Stephen, to a large extent, is a product of his environment,” she explains. “He grew up in a situation where love was a currency, and it was something you gamble with, something that is taken away and given as a reward. If your initial role models for love are so unstable, you aren’t given a f*cking chance. You have to have so much luck to get out of that — and he didn’t have that.”
The showrunner knows that viewers have spent a long time questioning whether Stephen truly has the capacity for change. “I feel like we answer the question of Stephen’s morality, to a degree, in a fun way, which I think people will be surprised by,” she teases.
While penning the second season, Oppenheimer and the rest of her writers’ room got into a heated debate over how Lucy handled Pippa being sexually assaulted by Lydia’s brother, Chris, at a party. With Pippa refusing to come forward or press charges against Chris, Lucy falsely claims she was also one of his victims so that he might face accountability — only for that decision to completely backfire on her.
There will be another similarly controversial storyline — which also sharply divided the writers — this season for Lucy, who “has a reaction to shame that is really profound and very, very dark,” warns Oppenheimer. “People will have very strong feelings about it. I don’t think everyone’s going to like it. They’ll enjoy watching it, but I think that some people will be offended. But I’m OK with that. I don’t think it’s our job to say what people should do on screen. I’m not writing role models. I’m just trying to hold a light up to what I think can happen in the real world.”
Oppenheimer has long been interested in the cultural tendency to tear down women for behaving badly and to make them atone publicly for their mistakes. As she scrolled on social media between writing seasons, the showrunner was “shocked” by the number of viewers who have wanted Lucy’s head on a spike.
“Some audience members really are so angry at her, much angrier than they are at Stephen, so I think people have been calling for her punishment, honestly, since season 1 in a way that I find to be very unfair,” she says. “So I’m doing this thing where, by the end of the season, it’ll be like, ‘Are you happy now?’”
Of all the characters, Oppenheimer says, the cast and crew “were most surprised by where Bree goes this season.” In the season 2 finale, Bree came to the shocking realization that Oliver (played by Oppenheimer’s real-life husband, Tom Ellis) — the older, married college professor with whom she has been having an affair — is in an open marriage with Marianne (Gabriella Pession), who also happened to be Bree’s professor. To make matters worse, Marianne appeared to be aware of Bree and Oliver’s relationship, which was characterized by a major power imbalance, the entire time.
Having an affair with a man more than twice her age “showed Bree a lot about her past” and “challenged her own image of herself,” which is “what college does in general,” Missal says. By the time she returns for the winter semester in season 3, Bree is “acting on impulse in a way that we may have not seen from her before. I think that she’s been easily manipulated before in the past not only with Oliver but in the friendships as well, and you’re going to see her become maybe a little bit more impulsive and manipulative.”
While Ellis was initially only planning to sign on for one season, Oppenheimer realized between seasons that the audience still had a lot of unanswered questions about Oliver, Marianne, and their open relationship. “I also felt like there was really untapped potential for conflict — not just with Bree, but with Evan,” she says of her decision to bring the professors back. “Oliver is the instigator for a huge search for self-discovery, basically, that Bree goes on that is really beautiful and very dark, and also very joyful at times.”
Bree’s storyline this season will be closely intertwined with the introduction of two new characters: Iris Apatow’s Amanda, described as “a bubbly but fragile college freshman keeping a big secret”; and Costa D’Angelo’s Alex, a psychology grad student and part-time drug dealer who has an existing connection with Bree.
After two seasons of showing “a lot of emotional and physical violence against women” and focusing on its long-lasting repercussions, Oppenheimer was keen to explore how trauma manifests in young men through the character of Alex, who was initially conceived as an older man who “looks like he could kill you.” But knowing that there was already a Stephen-esque character in the show, D’Angelo, a young Australian actor, approached the character in each of his auditions with markedly more heart and sensitivity — a choice that immediately caught Oppenheimer’s attention.
“Alex is really more than meets the eye, because he’s initially got these walls protecting him and he follows these rules. And then as the story goes on, we see what’s really under the surface with him,” D’Angelo says, teasing that other characters, including Bree and Lucy, will bring out different sides of him. As for Alex’s side hustle as a dealer, viewers should know that he is no drug kingpin. “He gets into this business as just a way to get through college, and he’s probably one of the better guys to sell these drugs to people because he knows he’s safe. No one’s in danger when it comes to Alex. He’s a protector, in a way.”
As she begins to “put together the pieces of her past and creates a personhood around that,” Bree will realize that Alex is a piece of that puzzle, Missal says. “He’s taking on a role for her that she didn’t necessarily know, until after the Oliver situation happened, that she maybe needed.”
Of course, there is an elephant in the room that needs to be addressed first. During their college years, Stephen made a recording of Evan confessing to him that he had once cheated on Bree with Lucy. Bree had found out about Evan’s infidelity, but he never told her that the other woman was Lucy. Looking to inflict the maximum damage on Lucy by destroying her friendship with Bree, Stephen waited until the day of the nuptials to send that recording to Bree, who is seen listening to that audio file at the end of the season 2 finale — all while Lucy, one of her bridesmaids, appears to be none the wiser.
“I think that the fallout from the voicemail is vast and brutal and wild, but it does not play out how people will anticipate,” Oppenheimer teases with a smile. To complicate matters further, Bree is also sitting on a secret of her own: The third season will finally reveal the holder of the private number who kept calling Bree on the day of her wedding.
“There’s a lot of baggage that both of them are carrying, and what they’re trying to do is figure out either how to manage that baggage or if they can manage that baggage,” Cook says of Bree and Evan. “We know eventually where they end up, but what are the inner workings of that last year for the boys who are graduating? What are the inner workings of how Evan manages to either get Bree back? And how do they end up coming back together?”
To hear Sonia Mena describe it, Pippa has been “f*cking obliterated” in the first two seasons of Tell Me Lies. Not only has she been drugged and presumably sexually assaulted, but she has also borne the brunt of her strained friendships and been accused of indirectly causing her then-boyfriend Wrigley’s (Spencer House) college football career-ending injury. At the top of season 3, feeling immense guilt over being one of the people who convinced Wrigley's brother, Drew (Benjamin Wadsworth), to return to campus before Drew died of an accidental drug overdose, Pippa spent the entire winter break taking care of Wrigley. Pippa and Wrigley have also rekindled their romantic relationship, but taking care of her boyfriend has admittedly taken a lot out of Pippa.
But Oppenheimer was adamant about giving the character some much-needed wins this season. “Pippa has so much trouble really finding her authentic voice. She hides in so many ways and is so worried about what other people think and pleasing them,” she says. “Sometimes it’s one step forward, two steps back, but she does have some real breakthrough moments this season where she really finds her voice.”
In one of the most surprising twists of season 2, the present-day timeline revealed that Pippa is now dating Diana (Alicia Crowder), who was last seen masterfully orchestrating a break-up with Stephen to get out of their festering relationship.
Whereas Stephen brought out more of a competitive side of Diana, who was always trying to find a way to one-up her partner, “Pippa brings out a much softer, more vulnerable side of Diana that maybe you haven’t seen before,” Crowder says. (Oppenheimer confirms that the new season will explore the origins of that queer romance, as both young women begin to explore their sexuality.)
Viewers who are waiting with bated breath to see Stephen get his comeuppance may get their wish sooner rather than later. In the college timeline, as Wrigley grieves his brother's death, Wrigley is “slowly starting to see maybe who Stephen is a little bit, or questioning what kind of guy he is,” House says. Crowder teases that Lucy and Diana “have some common ground that might bridge the gap that you’ve seen between them.” (As the old saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.)
When Tell Me Lies debuted in 2022, the series was met with both praise and backlash for its depiction of toxic relationships. Some argued the show romanticizes the very dynamics it claims to critique, but the creative team has always viewed the series, at its core, as a cautionary tale.
“It’s always the best compliment when I meet a fan, and they say that this show has encouraged them to get out of a situation like that,” says Van Patten, who has been able to exorcise some demons of her own past through playing Lucy. “The coolest thing that this show could do is shine a light on what is very bad in a relationship and what you don’t deserve and what you should not continue to take part in.”
