Like most designers, Grace Van Patten got on the low rise jean train long before everyone else caught on. She was filming Tell me lies, Hulu’s dark romantic drama that, crucially, takes place in 2007 — when the iPhone was in its infancy and fashion was, to put it mildly, dangerous. In her clothes, the actress was received with a pair of true religion jeans that stayed well below the stomach; she felt nauseated at the sight. But as production went on, her dismay at the returning wardrobe turned to appreciation.
“By the end, I was buying [low-rise jeans] at Depop,” she recalls. “I had a few Ed Hardy shirts in my wardrobe. I’m completely brainwashed.” But after she recovered a little from the character she had entered, she experienced another change of heart. “I’m slowly realizing that it might not be me,” she laughs. “The more I get away from her, [the waists] just go higher and higher.”
With cascading brown locks framing her beaming smile, Van Patten calls out from inside her Toyota Tacoma parked on a Los Angeles street. Dressed in a vintage Steely Dan T-shirt, she swings her legs up in the passenger seat like she’s joining a friendly FaceTime chat. Thoughtful moments are interspersed with laughs – her bubbly personality is a far cry from her latest role in Tell me lies. The actress plays Lucy, a cold and reserved university student whose barriers have hardened after a traumatic childhood. At one of the many parties where she drinks away her sorrows, she meets Stephen (Jackson White), another student a few years older than her, whose charisma attracts her attention and lust.
Like most teenagers, Lucy spends most of the series figuring out who she is, a process made all the more difficult by her troubled love life. When Van Patten was that age, she gave up schooling for her career, and her soul-searching took place in front of the camera. As her biggest role to date, Tell me lies reaches a point in a career that continues upward, from her idiosyncratic turn as a balloon-wearing entertainer to Under the Silver Lake in the scene-stealing role opposite Nicole Kidman Nine perfect strangers.
Based on Carola Lovering’s page-turner of the same name, Tell me lies traces Stephen and Lucy’s destructive relationship; Van Patten says he found the opportunity to tell the kinds of romantic stories that are muddled by complexity. “It reminded me of all my favorite movies, like Blue Valentine AND Urban Cowboy, where it’s this character study of people who fall into toxic relationships,” she explains. “It’s always fascinated me, for some reason.” The manipulative tactics Stephen uses, such as gaslighting and love bombing, feel of the moment, but in the show’s timeline, they take place during a pre-social media era, when that terminology hadn’t yet entered society’s vernacular. Despite his denials, Lucy is confused by the signs of his infidelity—a hair tie on his bedroom floor, a used condom—and struggles with what he is experiencing alone. However, the toxicity of dating culture has been growing like a noxious rot long before we had the words for it.
“I think everyone in the world has been through some version of this,” she says, crediting host and writer Meaghan Oppenheimer for bringing out the book’s universal truths. “I think it shows that you don’t necessarily see the red flags when you’re in it. Especially at that age, when you’re so in love with someone and it’s easy to confuse desire and passion and novelty with love.” It is something she has witnessed the patience of close friends. “I think every age is guilty of this, but it’s easy to mistake young feelings for something really deep. Then it all becomes clear once you get out and look [back] in it. It’s a really frustrating part about the show – you’re watching and you’re like “Run!”
Reading the script for the first time, Van Patten immediately connected with Lucy on a molecular level. “It was definitely a reflection of my younger self, especially my high school self,” says the actress. “I connected with the emotional wall that Lucy has built and [her] being afraid to be vulnerable. Looking back, I see the journey I took to discover that vulnerability is the most powerful and beautiful thing.” Lucy finds herself trapped within a power dynamic made unequal by Stephen’s age, experience and authority – but it was important to Van Patten that she not be portrayed as a victim. “Any type of person can fall into a toxic relationship, it’s not just the skinny girl who falls for this monster of a man,” she adds. “It’s much more complicated than that. You can be the strongest man in the world and be fooled.”
Lucy (Grace Van Patten) and Stephen (Jackson White) on Hulu’s Tell me lies.
Courtesy of Hulu
Unlike her character, Van Patten never had a typical college experience, as she put her higher education plans for acting on hold—but this rite of passage is depicted in all its intensity in Tell me lies, a show that practically emanates the stench of booze from its dimly lit party scenes. “I’m kind of glad I didn’t go, if it was something like that,” she says with a laugh. The shoot at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta was as close to the real thing as it gets, “without the homework.” As a bright-eyed, bold student, she drank the mid-campus coffee, walked the grounds with a backpack over her shoulder, and discovered just how “anxiety-inducing” the party scene could be.
“It definitely made me think about who I would be in that situation,” she says. “What faces I would try if I had the chance to reinvent myself with all these new people who didn’t know my story.”
In recent years, the likes of Amy Winehouse, Avril Lavigne and Blink 182 were in constant rotation for a pre-teen Van Patten. To return to that time for Tell me lies, the actress refused to listen to any music made before 2008 (a trip that, she says, “made me so angry.”). Nostalgia reared its head in other surprisingly illuminating ways. In the show, technology is limited to casual text messages via Blackberry as Lucy and her group of friends hang out on campus lawns and in dorm rooms. “I thought it was so refreshing, not seeing the Apple logo everywhere,” she says. “Take Instagram out of this story and it’s a whole other set of problems.”
“A big message of the show is, if everyone would just communicate and be honest with themselves and their feelings, none of this would have happened,” Van Patten tells me. “But this is not a common mindset. At 18, you don’t even know who you are yet.” There is a certain responsibility to set the worst example – so those red flags no longer go unnoticed. Then again, she feels lucky to be on the trip. “There is this fear [that] I will never work again, just because this business is so unpredictable,” she says, crossing her legs in the car seat. “But it’s so important to tell those stories and I’m glad I get to tell Lucy’s.”
