Dramatizing toxic relationships can be tricky, just ask the filmmakers and cast of “It Ends With Us.” While the movie about a woman who falls in love with a man who abuses her has been a box office success, it prompted discourse about whether it glorified domestic violence.
The Hulu series “Tell Me Lies,” now streaming its second season, is about an on again-off again relationship between Lucy and Stephen (Grace Van Patten and Jackson White). Their relationship isn’t physically abusive, but it is unhealthy.
Meaghan Oppenheimer, executive producer and showrunner, says she’s very mindful of respecting the weight of early relationships on a person’s life. She says at that age “you’re learning how to love and what love is.”
“This age is so important, and I think most people when they write about YA, they don’t take it seriously,” said Oppenheimer. “There’s sort of a flippant aspect to some of it.”
In “Tell Me Lies,” she also wanted to tap into how people sometimes romanticize unhealthy relationships with the justification that the harder they are to maintain, the stronger the connection.
“As you mature, hopefully you realize that happiness is the most exciting thing. The back-and-forth relationships, the on and off, they’re actually really boring because they follow the same cycle, and there’s never any actual growth,” she said.
We’ve all known someone like Lucy, have been Lucy, or even Stephen, says Oppenheimer.
“We’ve all had that friend, and a lot of us have been that friend. It’s wild what we do to ourselves in pursuit of love and sex. We accept behavior and treatment that we would never accept in any other part of our life, and we can be the most hurtful.”
Van Patten says she “can totally relate” to Lucy’s clouded judgement when it comes to Stephen.
“I definitely relate to being really young and not knowing who I am and grasping and pretending I knew who I was and losing myself in certain situations that I thought were priorities at that time.”
This season, Lucy and Stephen spend a lot of energy trying to make the other miserable. Van Patten and White are dating in real life, and Van Patten says the shift to their on-screen personas “was really fun.”
“(Lucy’s) anger is still a need to connect with him. It’s a way to still have Stephen in her life without being with him. I found it really interesting to act with (White) in those situations because there’s so much beyond what we had to say. It was almost kind of more how we were looking at each other and what we were saying in our heads as opposed to the lines that were written.”
Van Patten says they would apologize after a particularly cruel take.
“Before a scene we would be like, ‘People do this? This is crazy.’ And then we both have to, like, get into it and justify our actions and do it. And then it’s like, ‘My God. I’m so sorry I had to just do that to you.’”
White says he and Van Patten “could just kind of flip whenever we needed to,” but don’t share as many scenes in season two.
The new season introduces another unhealthy relationship — Lucy’s friend Bree (Catherine Missal) and the husband of a professor, played by Tom Ellis (“Lucifer”). Ellis is married to Oppenheimer.
“Someone pitched the idea of Tom, and I was like, ‘That’s crazy.’ Then I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I just asked him,” said Oppenheimer. “He was a little nervous but really excited. It’s darker territory than he’s played in before. I think by the end, it felt really heavy for him. It was hard for him to play a character that he couldn’t really forgive. I kept having to be like, ‘Be colder. Don’t smile so much.’”
Ellis says the role took its toll, but the couple’s baby daughter, Dolly, helped pull him out.
“There was no familiarity there for me at all. It left me feeling quite dark, actually, at the end of it,” he said. “I was really thankful for Dolly who was sort of an instant kind of release from the story that we were telling.”
When it comes to the characters, it’s more difficult to write Lucy than Stephen, said Oppenheimer.
“Stephen is obviously very complicated, but he moves in a straight line. He is completely focused on what he wants and everything he does serves a purpose to get that. Lucy doesn’t know what she wants.”
Lucy “doesn’t have the same set of tools that Stephen has. It’s harder to write a character who is doing things, and you don’t know why they’re doing them, because she doesn’t know why she’s doing them.”
It would be “wonderful” to see Lucy “come full circle” but not yet. “I think she has a long way to go, but it would be great to see her get it right,” Oppenheimer says.
Besides, Oppenheimer enjoys writing about the messiness in relationships.
“There’s so much progress we’ve made as a human race, but we haven’t figured out how to stop breaking each other’s hearts. If you read a love story from 100 years ago, the feelings are all the same. I think there’s something so strange about that.”
Oppenheimer is writing “Second Wife,” a more uplifting show for Ellis where he will star opposite Emma Roberts, who is an executive producer on “Tell Me Lies.”
Roberts will play a second wife to a Brit, living in London. Oppenheimer says the show is “funnier” than “Tell Me Lies” “with more heart.”
“I think people will assume it’s autobiographical. It’s really not except for the fact that I’m an American girl who married a Brit, and I’m his second wife. I know that people will think that … So, just putting that out there.”
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