“We Have Big Plans”: ‘We Were Liars’ Showrunners Break Down That Shocking Finale Twist, Cadence and Gat, and Possible Future Seasons
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[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for We Were Liars.]
Summary
- ‘We Were Liars’ showrunners Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie discuss the significance of chemistry in casting the Liars for the series.
- The Prime Video series’ season finale leaves viewers with a shocking cliffhanger, hinting at the potential for future seasons.
- If you go back and rewatch the series after you know the twist, you can pick up on the Easter eggs throughout the season.
From showrunners Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie and based on the best-selling novel by E. Lockhart, the Prime Video series We Were Liars follows Cadence Sinclair Eastman (Emily Alyn Lind) and her closest friends Johnny Sinclair Dennis (Joseph Zada) and Mirren Sinclair Sheffield (Esther McGregor), along with her first love Gat Patil (Shubham Maheshwari), better known as the Liars. Their escapades on Harris Sinclair’s (David Morse) private island in New England have always been memorable, until a mysterious accident leaves 17-year-old Cadence searching for answers that keep slipping through her fingers as she deals with a traumatic brain injury that’s left her with amnesia. As she gets closer to solving the mixed-up puzzle of her brain, dark family secrets threaten to tear them all apart.
During this interview with Collider, executive producers Plec and MacKenzie discussed cast the perfect Liars because their chemistry was so important, how they made everyone work to prove themselves as their characters, seeing Cadence and Gat brought to life, shooting the heartbreaking scene on the beach when Cadence finally remembers, that horrible moment when Cadence realizes what it really means to be a Sinclair, why you should go back and rewatch the series for the Easter eggs once you know the big finale reveal, and their hopes for Season 2.
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Collider: On its surface, this series is about rich, pretty teenagers on a private island. But then, there’s this mystery element, and I found the way it all unravels to be so compelling. If viewers haven’t read the book and don’t already know, you don’t want to tell them and ruin everything, so how tricky is it these days to tell a story that has such a big reveal, without revealing too much when you’re trying to tell people what it is?
JULIE PLEC: Honestly, it was trickier trying to pitch the show in two sentences, for that reason. It is a show about so many things that offers up so much of what we love about the television that we watch, and to try to distill it into one thought actually does it a disservice. And then, you start tripping over yourself because you don’t want to spoil anything. So, yes, writing it was easier than trying to pitch it.
What was it like to find the Liars and to cast those roles? You not only had to do it once, but you needed to find four people who were equally as talented.
CARINA ADLY MacKENZIE: It was a matching game, a little bit. When casting TV teenagers, you have options. Sometimes you’ve got a 16-year-old, sometimes you’ve got a 27-year-old. We needed them all to look like the same kind of teenagers. We need to believe them as a family and believe them as friends. And then, of course, we had to dive into the Cadence and Gat chemistry of it all, which was really important. It took a really long time. There was a strike in the middle of it all, and we were writing as we were casting, so the characters were evolving in the writers’ room as we were making decisions, which made it complicated. But I think we nailed it.
PLEC: Yeah, we’re really proud of where it landed. It’s funny, I have personally been lucky enough in my career that no one’s ever pointed at me when I’m about to start casting something and been like, “You must cast this famous person, or from this list of famous people.” And so, we always get to approach casting with, “May the best person win the job,” even those in our cast who may be related to some famous people, or at the very beginning stages of their career, or are stepping into their own leading roles for the very first time. We got to really pick and choose out of a long list of people that we got to audition and really try on for size, and that was a lot of fun. It takes forever and it’s frustrating, but it’s also really gratifying.
MacKENZIE: We made everybody work for it.
PLEC: We did. We were mean.
‘We Were Liars’ Showrunners Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie Took Their Time in Finding Their Liars
“Emily Alyn Lind was one of the first people that we saw for Cadence, and you never cast the first person that you see.”
Did you know immediately when you saw any of the main four, or were there some that had to convince you?
MacKENZIE: It took some convincing. We had another Johnny in mind. At least, I thought that there was another Johnny. And then, Joe [Zada] auditioned at 6am in Perth, Australia with blue hair and a fake nose ring for another role, and immediately it was like, “Oh, we were wrong about all the other ones. This is Johnny.”
PLEC: Mirren, we considered early, and then we pivoted away from the Mirren that she would have been a good match with, in terms of what was ending up on the page. For a whole month or two, the Mirren on the page was a completely different person, until we came back around to Esther [McGregor] and realized we’d rather change Mirren to meet Esther than to find the Mirren that we had written on the page. Emily [Alyn Lind] was one of the first people that we saw for Cadence, and you never cast the first person that you see. In fact, actors try to never be the first person in the room.
MacKENZIE: She was the very first.
PLEC: So, we had to come back around and rediscover her. And [Shubham Maheshwari] auditioned five or six times because he’s a brand-new baby and was learning to act along the way. By the time that we got him into chemistry reads, he had grown exponentially in this almost miraculous way. We saw Gat come to life before our very eyes, over the many, many times we brought him in. I think the only person who walked in and won the part, who we weren’t even expecting, was Mamie [Gummer]. She came in, auditioned, blew us all away, and then suddenly we were like, “Well, she could be anybody in this show, so which part does she want to play?”
There’s finding the right actor, but then they’re seeing them together and seeing that magic in between them. Did you guys each have moments, while this was shooting, when you saw them together and were like, “Oh, my God, that’s exactly how I pictured it”?
MacKENZIE: Particularly with the three sisters. On day one, we were doing makeup tests and hair tests with Candice [King], Mamie,and Caitlin [FitzGerald]. I was in [Julie’s] office looking out the window into the parking lot, and I saw them get out of the car. They’d just been on a Walmart trip together, and it was like watching the three witches from Hocus Pocus. They just had this energy to them and I was like, “Oh, we’re good. Okay.”
PLEC: One of the very first things we shot, I think on the first day, was Cadence and Gat in the hammock. Nzingha Stewart, our director, knew how we wanted it to look. She knew that it was all about toes against toes and eyes catching eyes when the others are not looking and watching someone’s mouth when they don’t know that you’re staring. She was playing this super-sexy song and it was perfect light, and they were cuddled up in the hammock together, and the camera was right there in their faces. We were like, “Oh, we’re going to be great. This is going to be fine.”
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As the one who can’t remember what happened and who is really quite distraught over everything that is happening, Cadence has a lot of pretty emotional moments, and that moment when she breaks down on the beach in the finale because she finally remembers everything is just so heartbreaking to watch. What was it like to see what Emily Alyn Lind brought to that moment and how it played out? I can’t imagine even watching that on set and not crying.
PLEC: I just got chills with you saying that.
MacKENZIE: Being on set for that, I think it said on the page that she lets out an animal scream. But actually hearing it, over and over and over, I was upset that I had made this young woman do this thing, over and over, and go there, over and over. I started to be like, “Do we really need to make her do this thing again?” It was very visceral and very painful, but it was the culmination of a lot of things. The really important thing about it, and the conversations that I had with Emily, leading up to shooting that moment, was that this was a moment of strength for her, in a weird way. She needs to know her story, and she finally knows the truth that she’s been seeing this whole time. So, it’s not a weak moment. It’s a strong moment. It’s a painful one, but she’s bearing the pain . . . Part of our jobs as showrunners is not just making sure everybody’s safe on set, but trying to take care of people’s mental health and checking in. I checked in with Emily, and I checked in with Emily’s mom, after this month of her going through these emotions on screen, just to make sure everything was okay. She’s a beautiful and professional and emotional actress, so she did it so beautifully and we’re so grateful.
Harris Sinclair Does Not See Himself as the Villain of ‘We Were Liars’
“Harris truly believes that he has been taking care of his family in such an extraordinary way.”
The scene in the finale when Cadence sits down with her grandfather and she tells him that she doesn’t want to be the heir, he asks if he wants to be “an entitled child with a crush who got mad at her family and committed arson, animal cruelty, and involuntary manslaughter,” which is a pretty horrible thing to say. Does he think that she should feel grateful for the fact that he’s essentially rewritten her story without her permission?
MacKENZIE: Yeah, he does. Harris truly believes that he has been taking care of his family in such an extraordinary way, and that they should all be so grateful to be Sinclairs and to get to exist in the narrative that he has established for them. One of the most important things about Harris is that he truly does not think he’s a villain, in any sense. He’s also a spectacular actor. We were so grateful to work with him. Watching those scenes, I thought about the great debates we would have in The Originals‘ writers’ room. Michael Narducci, our showrunner, said that the best arguments among characters are when both characters are pretty much right. And so, we approached it from that perspective in the writing, and they approached it from that perspective in the acting.
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Would you say that’s the moment that it really all sinks in for a Cadence, what it means to be a Sinclair and the gravity of what that is?
PLEC: I think so. And he’s not wrong either. Sure, she can come out and tell her truth, but how extraordinarily painful that truth is for everyone else in this story who lost somebody. To what end is that truth the right narrative?
MacKENZIE: She’s not going to hurt anyone by telling the truth about that night, except people who are already deeply hurting. If you imagine her saying to the reporter, “Yeah, we burned down the house because my granddad said some racist things,” the 24-hour news cycle goes away and Harris is a grieving grandfather again. It doesn’t do anything to tell the truth. That’s the painful lesson that she has to learn and that he traps her in. And so, there is more story to tell.
Along with ‘We Were Liars,’ There’s the Prequel Novel ‘Family of Liars’ to Mine for Material
“We have a lot of paths we can go down in future seasons.”
Image via Prime Video- Image via Prime Video
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- Image via Prime Video
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Image via Prime Video
Image via Prime Video
The moment at the end when it’s revealed that Carrie can see and talk to Johnny was such a huge moment to leave the series on. First of all, how dare you? But also, that leaves so many questions. Are those questions that you would like to answer in a possible Season 2? Do you have a good sense of where that is going? Is there a deeper mythology that you want to continue to dig into with this?
PLEC: Yeah, absolutely. And the prequel that Emily Lockhart wrote and published a couple of years back, thankfully, right as we were starting to write We Were Liars, does a beautiful job of telling the story of what good and bad trouble the Sinclair sisters got up to when they were the same age as the Liars were in Season 1. We have a lot of paths we can go down in future seasons while continuing to watch this family, and specifically Cadence, rebuild their souls, so to speak, and continue to fight the good and/or bad fight in present-day Beechwood Island. We also have many, many, many skeletons of the past that we can unearth, by going back and seeing what Beechwood was like before too. We have big plans. We need big viewers, and we will get in there and bring you great new stories as soon as possible.
MacKENZIE: I really hope that when people finish the show that they have the urge to start it over from the beginning and watch and see the little tricks that we played and the things that they missed. There are Easter eggs in there, for sure.
