Note: This story contains spoilers from “Tell Me Lies” Season 3, Episodes 1-3.
Just as quickly as Grace Van Patten’s Lucy and Jackson White’s Stephen found their way back to each other in the “Tell Me Lies” Season 2 finale, their progress was quickly undone in the first three episodes of Season 3, as Stephen struggled to reckon with the fact that Lucy and Evan (Branden Cook) slept together back at the end of Season 1 — the same night that Stephen ditched Lucy for Diana (Alicia Crowder).
“It just felt like [Stephen] was never going to let the Evan thing go, so it felt realistic to me that that would blow up relatively quickly,” showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer told TheWrap, admitting that there’s more conflict in the toxic exes being “at odds with each other than happy and together.” “I don’t know how much juice you could get from that, but I liked that we were able to still keep them in proximity to each other and interacting with each other, even if they’re not a couple.”
Even after Lucy chose to prioritize her friendship with Bree over her relationship, she couldn’t live with Stephen holding the secret over her, and instead offered him something more enticing to hold over her: A tape of her admitting she lied about being sexually assaulted. The tape, which Stephen coerced Lucy into shifting her explanation for the lie from protecting a friend to a plea for attention, represents a “life-ruining” threat for Lucy, according to the Oppenheimer, who aimed to heighten the stakes even more than past seasons.
“It’s always a delicate thing to navigate when you’re dealing with a subject that’s so painful for so many people. So I wanted to make sure that we really dig into the fact that when Lucy told this lie, she was not doing it for attention — she was not doing it for any malicious reason. She was doing it to protect her friend,” Oppenheimer said. “As long as we stuck to that, I felt OK about it, and I felt like I wasn’t glamorizing anything, or saying that it’s okay to lie about sexual assault, because obviously it’s not.”
The tape is one way Oppenheimer threaded the theme of consequences, punishment and inevitability into Season 3, noting that the audience begins to see that Stephen’s fatal flaw lies in his “desire to win and his desire to punish [that] is stronger than his desire to find happiness in himself.”
Even when Stephen started to see those consequences come to fruition as his sister iced him out, it only fuels his desire to want to punish Lucy more, per Oppenheimer. “He feels so alone and so angry — He doesn’t know how to deal with that in a healthy way, and so he lashes out more the people around him, and he seeks control even more in his surroundings,” Oppenheimer said. “In a lot of ways, if his sister hadn’t iced him out, maybe things wouldn’t have gone so badly for Lucy. It’s all a bit of a domino effect for him.”
Below, Oppenheimer also unpacks the sparks between Bree and Wrigley, the blossoming relationship between Pippa and Diana and why she wanted to “leave no question” about Oliver’s morality this season.
TheWrap: This season also introduced some sparks between Bree and Wrigley, who are both dealing with the aftermath of trauma. How did you want to chart both their characters’ journeys this season and what is it they find in each other?
Oppenheimer: When we find them at the beginning of this season, Wrigley is now the only person who has experienced the traumatic loss in the same way that Bree has — Lucy obviously experienced loss with her father, but I think that Wrigley and Bree have arguably the most f–ked up home lives now. And it was interesting to me to have two people that have never been in a room alone together, but in a group with each other, suddenly see each other in a new light, and realize that they don’t actually know this person that well, but they have so much in common. It was really lovely for me to be able to explore such a romantic storyline, because I think there’s a lot of darkness this season, but those two on screen together, they bring so much light to the season overall, and so much hope.
We also see Diana and Pippa kicking off their relationship, which is a fan favorite. How did you want to craft the start of their relationship at the same time as their self-discovery?
I wanted them to begin something in college, but I knew that it had to be a little bit short-lived, just because when we see them as adults in the future, it’s still very new, so I knew that they couldn’t be in a very long relationship in college. The most important thing to me was having the conflict between those two not be just specifically about the fact that they were both women and the fact that it was a queer relationship, and have their conflict be about other things and be more complicated than that. So often you see these queer relationships on screen, and that’s all it’s about when, in real life, those relationships are just as complicated as any other relationship.
I’ve also just seen that story before where it’s about repressed sexuality, and it was nice to have that not be the main issue between them.
We also meet a new character in Alex, who provides a sense of family for Bree but something very different for Lucy. Why is their dynamic one that Lucy was looking for and how might it impact the psychological warfare she’s already dealing with?
She’s in a place where she’s so in a shame spiral and she feels like she deserves punishment and she deserves shame. Alex is someone who is willing to give that to her because of what he’s been through. He’s been victimized in his past, and so he’s turning those tables — I don’t know if this is a spoiler and if I shouldn’t have said that yet. But at the same time, he’s a safe person to explore those things with, because ultimately he’s not a bad guy, but it was important to me that that relationship really be an authentic conversation that’s happening between two people on a physical level, and not something that was just trying to be provocative or trying to be kinky or anything like that.
Costa [D’Angelo], who plays Alex, was so phenomenal and brought so much vulnerability to it.
We also see Bree develop a relationship with Iris Apatow’s character. Why was Iris the right choice for the role, and does Bree even know what her intentions are as she develops a friendship with her?
I don’t think Bree knows exactly what her intentions are. Bree is struggling to stay afloat and figure out who she is. She’s been thrown a lot of of bulls–t at her, and she’s just trying to cope.
Iris was such an immediate “yes” for me — she’s so talented, and she also feels so young and has a real delicacy about her that you see her and you want to protect her. But she also feels very smart, and Iris is a very, very smart person, so you understand why a predator like that would maybe be drawn to that person, because she is vulnerable and delicate, but also has an intelligence about her. I think really showing how someone like Oliver looks at these people as prey and and looks for people who are struggling in some way or another, which that character is. I thought Iris really brought that out really beautifully.
Tom’s role as Oliver this season is much more limited but he’s still present. How did you craft what his role might be this season, especially with his interactions with Evan?
Knowing the untapped potential for conflict that we had for Evan and Oliver was one of the bigger reasons why I decided to bring him back, because it kept bothering me that we hadn’t seen that relationship explode. A lot of people didn’t see Oliver as a predator for a lot of Season 2, and even by the end some people didn’t, because I think Tom is, on the surface, so charming and compelling and and handsome. I wanted to leave no question about who he is this season. He and Marianne are, in some ways, like what Stephen and Lucy, or Stephen and anyone could become if you end up staying in relationship with someone like that, because I think Oliver’s a pretty bad guy.
What can you tease about what’s to come for the rest of the season?
[There are] some twists that people absolutely will not see coming. We will see good people go bad and bad people go good. I also think you’ll see a lot of really surprising romance that people are not expecting. But it’s also funny, I think the season is very, very funny.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
“Tell Me Lies” Season 3 drops new episodes Tuesdays at 12 a.m. ET/Mondays at 9 p.m. PT on Hulu.
