Photo: Ari Michelson
Warning: This post contains spoilers for Hulu’sTell Me Lies.
Grace Van Patten might be able to play a numb, lovesick 18-year-old on screen, but that doesn’t make it any easier for her to watch it back.
As her character Lucy Albright navigates a tumultuous first love alongsideJackson Whitein Hulu’s coming-of-age thrillerTell Me Lies, Van Patten, 25, admits that the role was “frustrating” at times.
“I found it so painful, especially watching it,” she tells PEOPLE. “But there’s a part of me that really empathized with her, because I’ve been there. I’ve lost myself in a situation before, where you don’t know what feelings are true and coming from your heart, or what feelings are coming from the people around you, and it’s really hard to see through the fog.”
The episodic release helped build the same sense of tumult and chaos as the actual characters are feeling. “It’s just like being in a toxic relationship where it’s addicting, and you love and you hate that person, and you wanna run away and you wanna come back,” explains theNine Perfect Strangersactress.
Josh Stringer/Hulu
Viewers were meant to grapple with their feelings for unfaithful Stephen and “emotionally repressed” Lucy as the season progressed — even Van Patten herself did. “It’s so tumultuous, which is kind of the essence of Lucy and Stephen’s relationship,” she says.
After the final episode aired Wednesday, Van Patten considered it safe to say that most viewers probably weren’t fond of Stephen, joking, “Just when you thought he couldn’t get any worse!”
But she clarifies that White is far from the character he portrays — even if he “understood Stephen so well.”
“I was nervous before Stephen was cast,” she admits. “I was like, ‘Oh, god, who is this gonna be?’ But the chemistry was instant. It felt like we had known each other our whole lives.”
Van Patten felt “safe” with White, which was essential given the level of onscreen intimacy required for the show.
Van Patten says she came to “appreciate all of the sex scenes,” because they each told a story. “It really shows the power dynamic in sex in relationships,” she explains. “And I found that so interesting. Every sex scene had a meaning, and a point, and was necessary to the characters and the plot. And I really admired it, because you don’t see that very often.”
In fact, the original script included evenmoresex than what ended up airing. In the sixth episode, as Jackson opened up to Lucy about where he was on the night of her roommate’s tragic death (which occurred in the pilot episode), Van Patten reveals the intense conversation originally ended with a sex scene — but she and White opted to take that out. “Reading it, we were like, ‘Oh, this makes sense.’ We didn’t really question it. But when we were actually on the day, [shooting] it, we were like, ‘This feels weird,’ so we decided not to do it, which I think was a good call.”
Still, she quips, “There’s no shortage of naked people in this show.”
At its core, Van Patten considersTell Me Liesa story about how love manifests itself, for both the good and the bad. “Lucy was so blindly ‘in love’ — she really thought she was,” she says. “So she mistook all of the secrets and the desire and the sexual awakening and the newness as love, and it really made her latch onto Stephen. Because in comparison to what she was feeling before — which was nothing, numbness — it felt like the world was beginning for her.”
She continues, “I saw a part of myself in Lucy, and I saw a part of almost every woman I know in my life in Lucy.”
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Tell Me Liescan be streamed in full now on Hulu.
source: people.com
