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SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the first three episodes of “Tell Me Lies” Season 3, now streaming on Hulu.
Just when you thought “Tell Me Lies” couldn’t get any more toxic, Hulu dropped the first three episodes of Season 3. As the group returns to Baird College after Christmas break, the dynamics are messy, almost immediately. Pippa (Sonia Mena) and Wrigley (Spencer House) are back together, but she’s also now sleeping with Diana (Alicia Crowder). Wrigley, who watched his brother die last season, seems to be the only one with his head on straight. One thing helping that is a new friendship with Bree (Catherine Missal); the pair bond while on MDMA and have an unexpected sleepover at a bus stop. They are also taking photography classes together to keep him busy and he looks to actually be enjoying himself.
“There are always those people in friend groups who spend a lot of time in the same space, but never alone. You’ll be in a friend group, and you’ll realize I’ve never actually had a private conversation with this person. So they know of each other, but they don’t know each other on a personal level,” says showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer. “They are, by Season 3, in a lot of ways, the people who have dealt with the most serious trauma in their lives. I always like stories where people who are at rock bottom connect and find healing within each other and find a surprising safe space with another person. So it felt just very organic to me.”
Bree, however, is not doing great on her post-Oliver (Tom Ellis) spiral. Plus, Evan (Branden Cook) has now realized that Oliver was the older man she was sleeping with. At the end of Season 2, Oppenheimer told Variety that she wasn’t planning to bring Ellis back for Season 3… but once she began breaking the season, that changed.
“There were so many questions that were still coming at me from people, and you don’t want to leave potential conflict that you don’t use,” she explains. “And, we never had him and Evan confront each other, and it just felt like wasted potential. So it just made sense to bring him back, but not in such a front-and-center way. It just felt unrealistic that he wouldn’t have some kind of interaction just a few weeks after all of that happened. He and Branden are really good friends, so it was nice to give them a little something to do together!”
On the Lucy (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen (Jackson White) front, they give it a go again for about five minutes — he waits for her to come clean about Evan, but when she doesn’t, he breaks up with her. Soon, he starts threatening to tell Bree, then decides to blackmail her after forcing her to record a video of herself admitting that she lied about being sexually assaulted the previous semester. Lucy is so overwhelmed that she has a panic attack.
“She starts to disassociate this season. She’s someone who’s always had struggles with her mental health since her father died. We talked about, maybe she’s depressed in Season 1, and she feels numb. And I think that she is,” says Oppenheimer. “That is the truth of what she was experiencing Season 1, and I think that made her the perfect target for this unhealthy relationship. You’re watching someone who doesn’t have the tools to deal with it and doesn’t have the support of adults.”
The executive producer notes that due to what Lucy has been through recently, this “felt like an honest outcome — for her to finally have this break where the inside of her cannot handle what is happening in her outside world, and so that fracture starts to happen where she’s literally disassociating.”
To distract herself, Lucy hooks up with Alex (Costa D’Angelo), the kind-hearted campus drug dealer, who happens to have grown up in foster care with Bree.
“The idea of bringing in someone from her foster family was always something that was in the back of my mind. I wasn’t sure how it was going to manifest, and then having it someone that was also tied to Lucy just was an organic thing that happened,” says Oppeneheim. Alex’s backstory will be revealed further as the season goes on, but at the end of the third episode, Lucy and Alex have very intense sex as she asks him to call her pathetic.
“On paper, the character’s a lot harder, and Costa came in with so much vulnerability and such a brokenness that he just blew off the screen for me,” says Oppenheimer. And while the series has featured explicit love scenes over the past two seasons, even Oppenheimer was shocked when she saw the final cut of the Alex and Lucy scene at the end of Season 3. “I was like, we’re really doing it. We’ll see what people say. I thought they both did so well in that scene. I thought it was beautiful, and I haven’t seen anything like it before.”
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