After captivating viewers with its steamy romances and unthinkable betrayals, “Tell Me Lies” is pumping up the volume as it traces the “ripple effects” of Season 1’s dramatics into a “faster paced” second installment, according to showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer.
“After Episode 1, there isn’t really a moment to catch your breath,” Oppenheimer told TheWrap of Season 2 of the Hulu hit series. “It’s one surprise, one betrayal, one shock moment after another, in a way that I think will be really fun for people, and also really infuriating. I think people are going to be probably pretty angry again [at the decisions of some of the characters].”
While the inaugural season followed the events laid out in Carola Lovering’s novel of the same name to introduce the toxic relationship between freshman Lucy (Grace Van Patten) and junior Stephen (Jackson White), without a second book as a follow-on, Oppenheimer was granted the freedom to play around with the next season, enabling her to deepen both Lucy and Stephen’s storyline as well as the ensemble.
What was already laid out, however, was Lucy and Stephen being split up after their dramatic breakup at the start of summer in the Season 1 finale, which challenged Oppenheimer to find ways to maintain tension between the leads despite not being on screen together as much as Season 1. “How can someone really still destroy your life and be entangled in your life when you’re not even with them anymore?” Oppenheimer posed, with Stephen’s actions this installment providing a clear answer.
While Lucy enters her sophomore year at Baird ready to “redeem herself for freshman year and all the things that she did to the people around her while she was with Stephen,” Oppenheimer admits Lucy also craves revenge, creating an internal tension that brings her closer to Stephen despite her wishes to expel him from her life.
“If you’re still trying to get back at someone for what they did to you, you can never really get that far away from them,” Oppenheimer said. “This initial trauma that they cause each other — you can’t really escape it unless you confront it and you’re honest about it, and because they’re both still holding so many secrets and so many lies, it’s impossible to escape. Because they both know each other’s worst secrets, they’re always going to be somewhat tied to each other.”
It’s clear these ties extend beyond the campus lines after Season 1 introduced a time jump to 2015, almost a decade after the crew attended Baird together, which revealed that years later, Stephen is engaged to Lydia (Natalee Linez), Lucy’s childhood best friend. After leaving fans speculating over the twist, Oppenheimer is giving viewers some of the puzzle pieces in Season 2 of how Lucy and Lydia’s friendship deteriorated enough for Lydia to be engaged to her best friend’s toxic ex.
“I think most people expected us to just go straight into how Lydia and Stephen got together, but it goes much deeper than that, because we really, instead, are untangling what happened between Lucy and Lydia before we even get to Lydia and Stephen in Season 2,” Oppenheimer said, revealing the team didn’t write the 2015 storyline until they had solidified the events of 2008 shown in Season 2.
Though the details surrounding Macy’s death remain one of the lies that ties Lucy and Stephen together and continue to impact the friend group, Season 2 moves somewhat away from the murder mystery and delves full force into the relationship dynamics of the group after taking note of audience feedback from Season 1.
“It was interesting to see the moments [audiences] responded to — It wasn’t the Macy stuff … or … anything to do with the death or the car crash — The stuff they really responded to were just the emotional wounds and the things that these people did to each other in a more romantic or in a more grounded way,” Oppenheimer said. “It allowed us to just dig in deeper to that and not worry about needing to have any kind of bigger mystery, or have another dead body, or anything like that. The mystery and the thriller really becomes these relationships.”
Oppenheimer also listened to fan feedback asking for more time with the ensemble, with Season 2 picking up after Pippa (Sonia Mena) and Wrigley’s (Spencer House) Season 1 breakup, as well as the drunken hookup between Lucy and Evan (Branden Cook) while he was in a relationship with Lucy’s best friend Bree (Catherine Missal), which Oppenheimer identifies as the “biggest betrayal” that happened in Season 1.
“One of the worst things you can do is to sleep with your friend’s boyfriend, so that, I would say, is the catalyst for so much this season,” Oppenheimer said. “It’s definitely the catalyst for a lot of Bree’s arc and choices that she makes because of this betrayal that she doesn’t even know about, but she knows that something is not right with Evan, and she knows that he’s acting different.”
With fans rallying together asking Oppenheimer to “protect Bree,” the showrunner jokingly admitted that Season 2 fails to do so. “There’s definitely more Bree, but I don’t know that it’s protected Bree, unfortunately.”
Cue the entrance of “Lucifer” star Tom Ellis, who comes on board as Oliver, a professor married to Lucy’s English professor. After being acquainted with the show and the cast through his marriage to Oppenheimer, Ellis already had a “degree of comfort” with the “Tell Me Lies” team, which was necessary as he played a “manipulative professor,” adding some darkness to the show.
“Everyone probably has a very preconceived idea of what that storyline is going to be … [but] I will say that there are twists that I don’t think people will see coming,” Oppenheimer said. “There things get really turned on it on its head late in the season, where I think people [will] get really, really surprised.”
Lucy also finds a new romantic interest in Leo, played by “Gossip Girl” and “The Invitation” star Thomas Doherty, whom Oppenheimer wanted to serve as a “genuine love rival to Stephen.” “I think a lot of times with a love triangle … the new guy that comes in is just sort of vanilla, and he’s a right on paper guy, and that that is very boring to me,” Oppenheimer said. “We wanted it to be a character that is flawed, that has his own unique personality and set of secrets and and issues that makes him compelling in a real way, so that it feels like a a genuine competition between him and Stephen.”
While Oppenheimer assured that Season 2 remains “very toxic and sexy,” she noted there’s a lot more heart in this installment as well, in both friendships and romances.
“It really moved me emotionally a lot more than Season 1 did in a gut way,” Oppenheimer said. “We have some really beautiful moments of sort of redemption between the characters, because they realize how much they mean to each other certainly in the platonic friendships, but also in some romantic moments as well.”
“Tell Me Lies” Season 2 debuts its first two episodes on Wednesday, Sept. 4 on Hulu, with new episodes premiering Wednesdays.
