tell me lies continues to push the envelope, raising eyebrows with a surprise masturbation moment involving Lucy and Stephen.
During the Tuesday, January 27 episode of the hit Hulu series, Lucy’s (Grace Van Patten) lie about being sexually assaulted haunted her through college. She was even questioned by her current love interest Alex (Costa D’Angelo)who thought her aggressive sex was Lucy’s attempt to overcome her trauma.
The episode ended with Lucy’s mental health deteriorating, leading to her masturbating to a toxic voicemail from ex Stephen (Jackson White). creator Meaghan Oppenheimer spoken exclusively Us Weekly about exploring Lucy and Alex’s complicated trauma through their sex lives.
“First of all, dealing with the trauma was really important, specifically in how it plays out in your sexual relationship,” she explained. “With Alex, before this season we saw sexual trauma and violence with a lot of female characters. Even emotional sexual violence against women.”
Season 3 gave Oppenheimer, 39, a possibility to go deeper.
“We hadn’t seen that manifested so much with a male character. I feel like a lot of times, I don’t see that on screen and it’s a disservice to men. It was really important for me to explore that with a male character,” he noted. “With Lucy, we’ve seen little hints of her shaming herself, but she really comes into it in an inescapable way this season.”
Oppenheimer said it was “very organic and realistic” for Lucy to deal with her issues in an unconventional way, adding, “These two characters would meet in the sense that Lucy is seeking shame and seeking punishment because she feels she deserves it, so she asks for it in sex. It was something that I had explored before that I hadn’t always been interested in that way. I always try to explore sex as a conversation on the show.
He continued, “It made sense to me that Lucy, after everything she’s been through, there’s a disconnect between her internal and external world. She’s fragmenting. She’s not able to keep the two aligned, if that makes sense.”
based on Carola Loveringthe novel of the same name, tell me lies follow the messy relationship between college students Lucy and Stephen. Their troubled love affair lasts eight years, and everyone around them is affected by Lucy and Stephen’s ups and downs.
While fans watched their characters explore complicated relationships on Tell Me Lies, the cast of the hit Hulu series was seeing sparks fly off screen in their own love lives. After the show debuted in September 2022, fans quickly began to wonder if Grace Van Patten and Jackson White, who played Lucy and Stephen, were (…)
White and Van Patten, both 29, spoke recently we about connecting with your characters – despite his troubling decisions.
“Three years of something is really hard,” White shared about playing the unpopular character. “I’ve never done that before. But I think we do a pretty good job of bringing some truth.”
Van Patten had a similar process involving Lucy. “It’s like any role I play where for the audience to understand them, we have to really understand them,” he said during the joint interview. “That means potentially justifying things that as humans we might not justify. But to serve the character, we have to find ways to understand that and understand their choices and find the truth in them.”
He continued, “That’s the fun part for me. And it’s really exciting, especially over three seasons, to go through Lucy’s actions and impulses.”
New episodes of tell me lies premieres Tuesdays on Hulu.