‘Tell Me Lies’ Star Grace Van Patten Is No Longer Shy About Her Relationship, Both On and Off the Screen
When Tell Me Lies debuted in the fall of 2022, no one was sure how it would do. The Hulu series, about a toxic relationship between two students at a fictional college, was the first project to come out of Emma Roberts’ adaptation-focused first-look deal at the streamer and featured a cast of relatively unknown — at the time — actors. But then, very quickly, star Grace Van Patten began to notice something strange; when she walked around Los Angeles with Jackson White (who plays the other half of the aforementioned toxic relationship), girls were rolling down their car windows or stopping them on the sidewalk to scream at her to get away from White, as if the world of the show were real.
“It felt like we were on a reality show,” Van Patten says. “It was cool that people were so invested in these characters — but also a little scary because he’s not like that in real life, I swear.”
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Tell Me Lies may be Van Patten’s first starring vehicle, but she is no newcomer. She grew up in New York City — her father is Emmy-winning director Timothy Van Patten — and attended LaGuardia, the city’s main performing arts high school (her classmates included Timothée Chalamet and Ansel Elgort), where she realized that acting offered the perfect outlet for the emotions and parts of herself that she previously was afraid to show. She booked a couple of small television gigs (Law & Order: SVU, Boardwalk Empire) before scoring her breakout role in 2017 as Adam Sandler’s daughter in Noah Baumbach’s film The Meyerowitz Stories. She’s also acted alongside heavyweights like Emma Stone (Maniac) and Nicole Kidman and Michael Shannon (Nine Perfect Strangers), putting the fresh-faced cast of Lies in even starker contrast.
Van Patten was young to be fronting an entire series by herself, but the show quickly became a hit, activating legions of young fans who felt compelled to debate the merits of the on-again-off-again rollercoaster of Lucy and Steven’s relationship on social media. The show’s second season was meant to go into production last summer, and a SAG strike delay tested Van Patten’s anxiety further. “I was seeing these other projects drop like flies, so I felt like I was in panic mode,” she says. “It’s hard to be positive in those moments.”
Now, at long last, season two premiered Sept. 4 — Patten’s Lucy has a new love interest (Gossip Girl’s Thomas Doherty), but the drama with Jackson remains, as does Lucy’s less-than-palatable behavior. “If I’m looking at her objectively, I feel for her, because while she does all these terrible and manipulative things, I do believe it’s out of a need for validation” says Van Patten. “We’ve all been there — it’s partly that age, where you mistake passion and newness for love, and that has the capability to make you go crazy. I’ve seen all my friends in that situation, too. Something disconnects in your brain and you don’t act the way you typically would.”
Interest in Tell Me Lies’ first season reached a new high when savvy viewers began suspecting that Van Patten and White had started their own offscreen romance. The two artfully dodged interview questions about their onscreen chemistry and played it cool when spotted out in public — Van Patten notes that, toward the beginning of their courtship, she dyed her signature blond hair black as a way of subconsciously shedding the character after filming wrapped, but that it also offered some protection from being recognized — until they eventually went public on their Instagram accounts.
“We didn’t think too much about trying to keep it hidden because it felt right and people were nice about it,” she says. And now they’re entering the second season, and the accompanying press tour, with their relationship at the center of their audience’s intrigue. It’s a scenario that has, in the past, pushed the stars of similar shows (Gossip Girl’s Penn Badgley and Blake Lively, Riverdale’s Lily Reinhart and Cole Sprouse) into promoting their personal lives in service of the series’ greater good.
She admits that she hasn’t yet thought about their strategy but adds she has no reason to worry. “I know a lot of the press around this show is very clickbait-y, but I’m not precious or paranoid about privacy,” she muses. “Our relationship is out there, but not too much of it. I think that just treating our relationship professionally, the way we treat it in our own lives, is the best way to go about it.”
For now, Van Patten is mostly worried about the show’s material creating the same sort of connection to audiences as it did two years ago — “The juiciness and everything people loved about the first season feels very consistent to me,” she notes — while looking toward the future. She recently moved to Los Angeles full time and loves the way walking around her canyon neighborhood feels like a “little town.”
And she’ll soon be starting production on Hulu’s limited series based on Amanda Knox’s life. In playing the convicted then exonerated Knox, it’s the first time Van Patten will take on a character that, she says, she can’t relate to easily. “I’m still figuring myself out, but a great way to discover things about myself is through acting,” she says. “So many of the people I play have felt like extensions of myself, and this is the first job where I’m like, ‘Where do I start?’ ”
This story first appeared in the Sept. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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