[Editor’s note: The following interview contains spoilers for the “Tell Me Lies” Season 2 finale.]
In the wake of another delicious and devastating “Tell Me Lies” finale, creator Meaghan Oppenheimer had just one apology to make. “I’m sorry that relationships suck so much,” the showrunner and screenwriter told IndieWire. “I’m very sorry to the audience that it seems like everyone has been so traumatized by their own relationships. It feels like this universal and inescapable thing.”
You wouldn’t know it looking at Oppenheimer and actor Tom Ellis, who married in June 2019 and spoke at length about their experience collaborating on Hulu’s obsession-worthy fall drama. Adapted from Carola Lovering’s novel of the same name, “Tell Me Lies” Season 1 is a murder mystery investigated by way of an especially warped college romance. In Season 2, Oppenheimer exploded that concept to incorporate several new storylines — chief among them, a toxic love triangle that cast her husband as a predatory professor.
“It feels like a more complete season in many ways,” said Ellis. “One of the great things about this show is that life isn’t black and white. We all do bad things, and we don’t think about the consequences of them — because we do them as self-protection or as moments of extraordinary ego. Seeing that not just in our central characters, but also in everyone around them, it became a richer, deeper, more toxic pool from which to fish.”
What happens to Bree (Catherine Missal) in Episode 8, “Don’t Struggle Like That, Or I Will Only Love You More” does resemble a shooting in a barrel. To play the astonishingly manipulative Oliver (“I absolutely hate him,” noted Ellis), the “Lucifer” breakout relied heavily on Oppenheimer’s vision for a “subtler” and in some ways even more villainous alternative to her series biggest bad, Stephen (Jackson White).
“I definitely drew on experiences in my own life, dating people when I was much too young to be dating them and feeling like I had a certain amount of power there,” said Oppenheimer. “Now, I’m looking back in my thirties and realizing, ‘Oh, my God, I was entirely powerless.’ It’s this timeless phenomenon that happens to young girls who are preyed upon by older men.”
From Todd Haynes’ “May December” to Halina Reijn’s upcoming “Babygirl,” destructive age gap relationships are being explored more and more in cinema. It’s fertile ground TV has explored before (see “Pretty Little Liars”) — but rarely with the pernicious surprise seen in “Tell Me Lies.” During the season finale, Bree learns the illicit affair she thought she was having with an older man is really the third leg in an open relationship with his wife and fellow professor, Marianne (Gabriella Pession).
“We knew we had to keep the stakes as high as they were without there being another dead body in the mix,” said Oppenheimer. “I allowed myself to be more vulnerable as a writer this season. I loved Season 1, but it didn’t break my heart in the same way. This season, we went to some places that really, really broke my heart.”
In their exclusive conversation with IndieWire, Oppenheimer and Ellis illuminate the process of crafting such a noxious character — and explain why they see the Oliver-Bree-Marianne storyline as an important extension of the MeToo era. The spouses also dissect the importance of intimacy coordinators on set, the sexist headwinds Oppenheimer faces as a major female creative, and the growth they’ve seen in each other as artists.
“It’s a strange thing,” said Oppenheimer. “Maybe people just assume that women are not as capable of separating personal from professional and think that if I’m writing this character and my husband is playing it, it must say something about my personal life. In all honesty, it’s just a story I wanted to tell and he’s just a really great actor who I trusted with the role.”
Read on for Oppenheimer and Ellis’ deep dive into Baird College’s worst educator — and a sneak peek at their next project, “Second Wife.”
The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
IndieWire: You’re two seasons and two finales into “Tell Me Lies” — and the show has never been buzzier. Meaghan, take me back to how you first got involved.
Meaghan Oppenheimer: Hulu approached me. They had the rights to the book with Belletrist, Emma Roberts’ company. Sasha Silver [head of drama originals at Hulu] and I had met a lot on other things and she’d read some of my spec stuff and we just really liked each other. So, I think it was Sasha that thought of me initially. They brought it to me and they said, “We have this book, but we don’t know what the show is. What would your version of it be?” and they gave me the freedom to try whatever.
So, I went and did a month of work on a pitch. Then, I pitched it to them, and I think one other writer pitched as well. Hulu liked what I was doing, and it went from there. It was nice because I started writing the pilot during the pandemic. I was busy the whole pandemic really, which is good because think I would’ve gone out of my mind if that hadn’t been the case.
Tom, you just joined the cast in Season 2, but you’ve been with “Tell Me Lies” in a personal capacity for some time. What has it been like for you to watch the show’s evolution through Meaghan and then join the team officially?
Tom Ellis: I was really delighted with the response to the first season because I’d seen how hard Meaghan worked on it. And while the cast was coming together and I was visiting set and seeing stuff that was happening, it felt like the show was just materializing really well. Of course, you never know about these things until the final product is delivered — but it was great to see it develop.
I didn’t ever think watching the first season that I would be invited onto the show. I didn’t know if there would ever be character that I could play in it. But then when Meaghan was coming up with storylines for Season 2, she came to me and told me about this character that they were working on, Oliver, and asked, “Would I be interested at all in doing it?”
I was delighted to be considered, but also, I was really excited about getting involved because it’s very difficult to know if things are going to work or not. If something has worked and then you get a chance to be added to it for its second season, you know there’s eyes on it already. You know there’s some heat and some interest in it. That for me was really tempting. So, that plus the fact that I know what an amazing writer and storyteller Meaghan is, I knew that the material would be great. It was a no-brainer for me in many ways, even though the character is quite polarizing.
Meaghan, I read that it wasn’t your idea to cast Tom as Oliver initially. Do you mind sharing whose idea that was? Who had the thought first?
Oppenheimer: It’s actually funny, because two different people take ownership of the decision. So, I’m not going to say the name because I don’t want to discredit anyone, but in my memory, it was one person from the network who floated the idea by me. They had just worked with Tom on “Washington Black.” They had a really great experience with him and they brought it up to me as a possibility.
At first, I was like, “Oh, that seems crazy. I don’t think he’d want to do it.” Then when I mentioned it to the writers in the writers’ room, they were like, “Oh, he’d be so great.” As we were writing, it became this joke where we could only hear Oliver’s story in Tom’s voice. Finally, I brought it to Tom, I asked him about it, and he wanted me to walk him through the character. Initially, I assumed that it was going to be like an Italian guy because Marianne (Gabriella Pession) is Italian — but I’m glad that wasn’t the case.
Ellis: I did audition with an Italian accent.
Oppenheimer: [Laughs.] No. He’s kidding. That didn’t happen.
Like you said, Tom, you never know how things are going to turn out until you see them on screen, but what Meaghan created with Season 1 evolved into this complimentary and yet remarkably different tone for Season 2. It’s almost… edgier? Did you see that shift coming?
Oppenheimer: I never thought specifically that we were changing the tone. I knew I wanted to expand on the universe. I knew I wanted to dig deeper with all of the other characters, and I knew I wanted to take more risks. I guess maybe that translates to it feeling a little edgier.
For Season 1, we had certain restrictions. There was the Macy (Lily McInerny) storyline that was from the book that we had to fulfill. And with Season 2, I was really worried that they were going to demand another murder. Usually, if there’s a murder in Season 1, there has to be in Season 2 — but I knew that was never what the show was to me.
When you’re first establishing a universe, you always get a lot of notes and there’s a lot of discussion. Hulu is extremely collaborative and there was initially a bit of a push to make it more about the Macy mystery. But I said over and over again, “I just don’t think that’s what people are going to care as much about. I think people really want to see what these characters do to each other in ways that reflect their own lives. It’s the simple stuff. It’s the small stuff. It’s the betrayals and manipulations, not the murder.”
That’s darker and more relatable than a whodunit in many ways.
Oppenheimer: I think so. I think the things that people actually do to each other are usually way more fucked up than what happens in murder mysteries. That was a fight I really had to fight in Season 1, but then it was really lovely afterwards. They were like, “You were right. It does seem like people cared more about the emotional stakes than the death.” I remember Jordan Helman [head of scripted content at Hulu] was like, “Look, just don’t bore me and I won’t make you kill anyone else.” [Laughs.]
Talk to me about the character you two crafted here. How do you feel about Oliver?
Oppenheimer: I wanted to create a subtler villain. Stephen (Jackson White) is just so clearly terrible. I wanted to show someone who was equally manipulative and dark and toxic, but in a gentler, sneakier way. I’m always very interested in power dynamics. There’s a period in a girl’s life where you go from being a little girl to suddenly people looking at you in a very different way. As a little girl, you’re so protected. You’re like the most protected thing on Earth. Then literally, overnight men are looking at you in a different way. It’s a really destabilizing period, at least it certainly was for me and for a lot of girls, but there’s also this weird power that you feel.
Ellis: You do always ask yourself questions with a new role, like, “Why am I doing this? How are people going to react to this? How are they going to react to me?” Certainly, doing a delicate storyline like this, I did have a slight anxiety about that, but I had to keep reminding myself that I was servicing a story — and that it was an important story to tell. The challenge for me as an actor within that was to not judge Oliver whilst I was playing him and leave that judgment in the home and try to find what his intentions or lack of intentions were and whether he had feelings for Bree (Catherine Missal) or not.
I had to just switch off my conscience, I suppose, and let it happen and play it out as normally as possible. The elephant in the room is the dynamic of that relationship and those two people together. I had to completely ignore that and not worry about it. It wasn’t until I’d finished the final bit of work in the finale, and I got home and I sat down that I had a little moment to myself with a glass of wine. I looked through the script from beginning to end — at all the work I’d done over the last few months. And I thought, “Oh, my God. This guy’s a psychopath.” I just wasn’t allowed to go there while I was doing it. I had to switch off.
Oppenheimer: It was interesting, because you were in such a bubble with your storyline and Bree has this whole other life that is very childlike and very young. She’s playing at adulthood with Oliver. I remember you coming into the edit, because I edit from home, and you watched a scene with Bree and the other girls where she’s giggling and they’re being very young and talking about something like, “Oh, this guy flirted with me!” And you were like, “My God, I forget that she’s 19.” It was unsettling to you.
Ellis: Bree is the same age as my eldest daughter in real life and every time I reminded myself of that, I was like, “Don’t go there, don’t go there.” It was alarming, but again, I had to work in a vacuum in order to do it. Thank God we had our little baby Dolly who was three months old when we started. That immediately took me out of it. Every time I got home from work, I had this purity in front of me. I was trying to just eat it up basically to make myself feel better — but it was a challenge. I had to remind myself that we can’t always play characters that we like as well. We have to do stories that we like, but the character is the character within it.
Oppenheimer: Another reason it was important to have him come in as an older character was I think sometimes a lot of the audience is hard on these characters, especially Lucy (Grace Van Patten), and they forget that these are very young people. These are 19-year-olds who are not fully developed. Bringing in a real adult reminds people, “Oh, wait, we’re dealing with children and these kids are not really adults yet.” That was good with Oliver, to show someone who is just really not fighting fair.
We’ve seen this area of power dynamics and age gap relationships getting explored in art more, particularly with cinema. Did you draw from any specific inspirations for Oliver’s arc?
Ellis: Meaghan had a reference for me when we first started, a book called “My Dark Vanessa.”
Oppenheimer: I had a very strong visceral reaction to that book. It sat in my gut for weeks afterwards. The psychological manipulations felt so unbelievably accurate. It made me rethink moments in my own life where I realized how manipulated I had been when I was much younger. I think I told Cat about that book as well.
Ellis: Those relationships do happen. When I was at drama school, there were stories about such professors. One had a baby with a student, but weirdly back in the ’90s, they were still allowed to come back to work. It’s amazing how much that conversation has shifted, since MeToo especially. The dialogue around it has completely changed and you have to remind yourself that these things do happen.
Working through this challenging material, have you seen a change in yourselves and each other as creatives?
Ellis: Meaghan is not only a brilliant writer, but she will one day be a brilliant director. She gives incredible direction on set to the actors when it’s asked. She is able better than anyone I’ve ever worked with before to call me on my bullshit. What I mean by that is she can see right through it if something isn’t connecting. All actors have habits. If I’m falling into tropes or habits of mine, she’s going to be the first to call me out on it.
It really kept me on my toes in a way that I relished. So, whilst I didn’t enjoy the character, I enjoyed the process of the work because I felt constantly challenged. I was constantly having to push myself or I was being pushed. I love that because I know that the work will excel because of it.
Oppenheimer: With Tom, something I love about him is that he hasn’t changed that much since I first met him. I met him when he was just starting. He was doing the pilot of “Lucifer” and he has stayed the same person from the very beginning of that. I’ve seen so many other people have success and change even in small ways that are negative. You are really just the exact same person you always were, which is so—
Ellis: I don’t know if it’s good or bad actually.
Oppenheimer: It’s lovely. It’s wonderful! But the change I have seen is your confidence and your trust in yourself. Certainly, with this role, you just stripped away any excess. You were so simple and such an exacting minimalist in your performance that it was amazing. I thought you did such good work.
As for how I’ve changed, I still worry constantly…every day, always. But I have stopped worrying as much about people-pleasing. It’s such a cliche, but it really is true that I think women are held to different standards. Apologizing for being in charge is something I did a lot of in Season 1. Then this season, I had to just forget that and say no when I wanted to say no, because at the end of the day, my name is on it and I have to stand by it. If it’s going to fail, I at least want to fail with something that I like.
Ellis: Meaghan’s superpower is knowing exactly what she wants and that’s in the writers’ room as well. All the writers will tell you that. She’ll hear ideas and she’ll be like, “Yes, no, yes.” She knows exactly what she wants, which is really not that common. There’s a lot of wishy-washy, “Maybe this, maybe that, maybe this…” on some sets. That really is not helpful when you’re trying to create something.
If someone really has a vision, which Meaghan does, and they’re able to implement that vision, it’s such a positive for the whole experience. Apologizing for your superpower is what you don’t want to be doing. It was lovely and it is lovely to watch her blossom and really take ownership and charge of her brilliance.
Do either of you have anything to say about the experience of your personal relationship being perceived while doing “Tell Me Lies” press? Has that been difficult?
Oppenheimer: It has been really surprising to me. Casting Tom in this, I knew that there would be some audience members who aren’t in the industry who don’t understand the technicality of it all, who might be surprised or could think, “Oh, my God, that’s her real-life husband!” But I was very surprised by the amount of journalists and even professional people who thought there was something almost salacious about me casting my husband in a sexual role. Male showrunners, directors, writers, and producers cast their wives and girlfriends in romantic leads historically. That happens all the time. No one thinks it’s weird and no one thinks, “Oh, their personal life must be blending into this.”
There have been some interesting comments that are like, “Oh, what a kink!” or something as if we’re getting off on it — which is so ridiculous because anyone will tell you, filming these scenes, it’s only uncomfortable. My main concern is always, “Is everyone comfortable? Does Cat feel safe? Does Tom feel safe? Is the story being told?”
Ellis: It feels like if you actually hold up the experience on set to people saying these salacious comments, it’s like, “You guys are so far behind the times.” This was the first time I’ve ever used an intimacy coordinator, which is a new role that came into TV and film, again as a result of the MeToo movement. Even though these are probably the most graphics scenes I’ve done in my career in many regards, it’s also the safest I’ve felt in that environment because before intimacy coordinators, that communication with the person you’re performing with was often just left up to you guys.
The director might come in, but everyone knew it was awkward and everyone knew we were going to have to do this thing. It was almost like we didn’t talk about it until the very last minute, and then you just went for it. Working with an intimacy coordinator, it’s almost like having a lawyer in those situations now for both of you. You really work out what is safe, what you want to achieve in the scene, and how you safely get there so no one is feels like they’ve been compromised in their workplace afterwards.
So, whilst our situation on “Tell Me Lies” may seem salacious and weird to people that don’t know the business, it’s always awkward doing those things — whether your wife is on set or not. Now, it’s less awkward than it’s ever been because of the intimacy coordinator role.
It strikes me as particularly ironic with this show too. You talk about Meaghan knowing what she wants as a storyteller and taking an almost algebraic approach to creating murky emotional environments. There’s an irony to people projecting a tawdry dynamic behind the scenes when it’s not there.
Oppenheimer: Yeah! It really is interesting. I don’t know what we would do without the intimacy coordinator because I think what is so great is, like you said, it protects actors but it also protects me. We’re never in a position where I’m asking the actor to do something. I talk to the intimacy coordinator first, and I say, “Here’s what the scene needs.” Then she goes to the actors and they say to her what they’re comfortable with and what they’re not.
Ellis: Individually.
Oppenheimer: Yes, individually. Because I know that if I’m asking the actor, “Hey, do you feel comfortable showing this or that?”, I’m their boss and they’re going to feel inclined to do it. Even if I tell them, “Whatever you want, whatever you want!” — they’re going to want to please me. It’s easier for them to say no to someone else’s face. I totally respect that, and I prefer that because it protects everyone.
What are your plans for collaborating in the future? More “Tell Me Lies” or do you have other projects you’re working on together?
Oppenheimer: We have a few things that we want to keep working on together because we really enjoy it and we work well together. We have a project called “Second Wife” that’s in development at Hulu, which is really a passion project for both of us. It’s called “Second Wife” — and I am Tom’s second wife. There will be people that think that it’s autobiographical, but it’s not. It’s influenced by the experience of joining a pre-existing family, but the characters themselves are very much not us.
Ellis: It came from the old adage of write what you love. Our experiences in our lives, they are parts of that story, but they’re parts of that story because we realize that we are one of many, many people going through similar experiences. To find a way to connect with that and deliver it in an entertaining, funny, and of course, it’s Meaghan, so pretty dark way is what we wanted to do. Most things that we find funny, they come from a place of darkness more often than not. That was our mission again with this project, and we’re really excited to continue developing it and hoping to get it out there.
Oppenheimer: I just crave simpler stories. When you’re out there selling stuff, you’re told all the time, “You need either big IP or you need a major hook.” And that’s so funny because the stuff that has been doing well, they are these simple stories that people just relate to. So many people want to watch things that remind them of their own lives and they connect to those shows in a more personal way. Those are the stories that interest me. At the end of the day, I want to write about real relationships and families and flawed people interacting in a way that’s dynamic as well as authentic.
“Tell Me Lies” Season 2 is now streaming on Hulu.
