After playing someone who lies repeatedly, actor Jackson White finds himself over-communicating so he won’t be misunderstood.
In “Tell Me Lies,” a Hulu drama about a relationship over the course of eight years, White plays Stephen, a seemingly honest college student who falls for Lucy, a freshman, played by Grace Van Patten. The two engage in a relationship and, then, there are other close encounters that prompt both to lie. Repeatedly.
People are also reading… An accident heightens things and accelerates the steam. “Tell Me Lies,” in fact, features plenty of close encounters of the R-rated kind. Both actors say they were nervous about the scenes but trusted the producers. Because there was an intimacy coordinator to guide them, there wasn’t any surprise in the way those scenes played out. Kreiss says to make it look seamless and sexy onscreen, “it has to be incredibly unsexy in shooting.”
While most of the characters seem like they’re majoring in relationships, they go through an eight-year cycle that reveals the truth about their pasts and their families. Van Patten says she heard the same lectures and relatives “tried to steer me away from it as long as possible. But I think that’s how they knew and I knew that I really wanted to do it.”