Interview

Author E. Lockhart Talks Bringing Shocking ‘We Were Liars’ Twist to TV, ‘We Fell Apart’ & More

Unreliable narrator alert: We Were Liars follows the summer exploits of heiress Cadence Sinclair (Emily Alyn Lind) as she tries to unravel what really happened on her grandfather’s fictional Massachusetts island with her and her best friends (dubbed “the Liars”) after a traumatic brain injury scrambles her memories. The young adult book from author E. Lockhart that the series is based on originally came out in 2014, became a TikTok sensation during the pandemic, and now the small screen adaptation of the YA book is finally set to come out on Prime Video on June 18.

It’s been a long road for Lockhart, who had been eagerly waiting for years for her psychological thriller to be adapted, and is now an executive producer on the series. (She also wrote the finale — and if you know the ending, you know how important that tidbit is!)

“We Were Liars has been in development for film or television since it was first published,” Lockhart admits. “Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie [the series’ EPs] had tried to get it some years ago and had stayed in touch with me ever since. And so, when it became available again, [they] pounced on it. And at that point I knew that I wanted to work with them [too], because they had so much ongoing passion for the story, and I knew that they had a real vision.”

Fans, you’re going to enjoy this vision, trust us. Below, Lockhart unlocks what’s ahead.

When you looked back at the original novel, was there anything that you wanted to change about the story that you adjusted for the show?

E. Lockhart: While the show is very faithful to the themes and the story that readers responded to, it also expands the world of the books, as any good TV show will do. We had four writers of Indian descent bringing not only their lived experience, but also their comedy chops and thriller expertise and all of their TV writing experience to the show. But what that means is that the characters of Gat and Ed [played by Shubham Maheshwari and Rahul Kohli, respectively] are fleshed-out and given complexity and more nuance and bigger storylines than I could ever have done well myself because we had such a wealth of of writers working on the show.

What was it like casting the Liars?

Lockhart: It was a long process to cast the four leads who are the Liars of the title. Partly because we were casting for a while and then we hit the WGA strike and everything was paused. But it meant that our casting team had a lot of time to mull and think about who else might be available. The actor who plays Gat, Shubham, came in through the open call. They saw actors who didn’t have representation for all four of the teenage leads. Shubham was a college student in Canada. He was in his senior year, and he had never acted professionally. And he is just spectacular in the show. I think people are going to fall in love with him. It was really exciting to feel like we discovered him.

He spent huge amounts of time working to understand his craft and developing his skill, so that he could match our Cadence. Emily Alyn Lind, who plays Cadence, has been in TV and films since she was very young.

Jessie Redmond / Prime

She’s amazing. Cadence and Gat have this ultimate summer romance that you see start to unfold in the beginning of the series. What can you say about what their connection looks like in the show?

Lockhart: Gat and Cadence have known each other since they were eight years old and became the closest of friends and comrades when they were little. The summer that they were 16, that friendship blossoms into a romantic connection just at the point when Gat is also understanding the world of the privileged, elitist Sinclair family in a different way than he ever has before. He’s an intellectual kid. He’s traveled the world, and he’s beginning to see the problems in the family and the cracks in their perfect exterior, at the same time that he is falling madly in love with the heiress to the family fortune.

Are there any particular moments that play out between Gat and Cadence that you can tease for fans?

Lockhart: There’s a scene that is in the book that is also in the pilot that I think my readers are going to really love, which is a moment when Gat and Cadence go out on the boat together, just the two of them. It’s one of the first times in a very long time that they’ve hung out. They jump in the water, and it is way too cold, and they get freaked out that there might be sharks in the water, they’re splashing around…and when they come out, there’s this moment where suddenly, it feels very romantic between them. And it recreates, I think, the feeling that people got in reading that scene in the novel so beautifully.

You’ve also cast Joseph Zada just before he becomes a young Haymitch Abernathy in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping. That’s some very good fortune.

Lockhart: If you would like to see Joseph Zada before he’s Haymitch, this is your show. [Laughs] We saw a million handsome guys [audition for Johnny]. We saw a million funny guys, who were also handsome. Joe is another level of excellence. He is not just funny, he is not just handsome, he is wounded and deep and truthful, while being hilarious and handsome.

We also get to see a lot more of the adults in the Liars’ lives. What was it like to get to see the story evolve more with that generation of characters?

Lockhart: So, I feel like everybody who got obsessed with those three ladies in The White Lotus [Season 3] are going to be all the more obsessed with the three [Sinclair] sisters. They’re complicated, messy, beautifully acted. Candice King [Bess Sinclair], who was in The Vampire Diaries, which Julie Plec showran — she came in and auditioned for us, despite having worked for Julie for eight years. When she came in, she did a scene that is in the pilot where she’s upset about her husband not showing up and she smokes a cigarette [Laughs] and she did it so exquisitely, I still have it in my head. She was just undeniably perfect for Bess.

And then we have two other powerhouse actresses: [Masters of Sex star] Caitlin Fitzgerald [as Penny Sinclair] and [True Detective‘s] Mamie Gummer [Carrie Sinclair]. They run around in the most amazing clothes, and they are funny with each other, and they fight with each other, and they are up to all kinds of entitled sisterly shenanigans. I think it’s a really good time.

The book is known for having a very big twist at the end. Can you say if we get the same twist onscreen that we do in the book?

Lockhart: Yeah, I can say that it is the same. A TV show is always different from a novel because it is fleshed out, there are visuals, but the book is the bone structure of the show.

There are a lot of connections between We Were Liars and some classic literature, particularly Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I noticed that you’ve said before that that wasn’t an entirely intentional connection, but it came along later in your writing process with the original novel. Can you talk about what that discovery was like for you?

Lockhart: Well, I have a PhD in the 19th-century British novel, so 19th-century novels are always wedging their way into my books both intentionally and unintentionally. [Laughs] Wuthering Heights is a story about an outsider boy who comes into a wealthy, elite family that looks down upon him, and yet kind of adopts him as one of their own. He falls in love with the girl and the family, and that creates a giant fissure in the family setup. And that is also the story of Gat and Cadence. When Gat and Cadence fall in love, all of the cracks in the Sinclair family facade become visible.

But it’s also like [William Shakespeare’s] King Lear. It’s also a thousand fairytales. I think readers will see echoes of those things throughout the TV show as well. The showrunners did not shrink away from the literary references and from trying to create a show that was deep and resonant.

You also released a prequel novel, Family of Liars, in 2022, and you have We Fell Apart coming out on November 4, 2025. What is the connection to the Sinclair family for We Fell Apart? What can you tease for fans of the Liars universe aside from the fact that they absolutely must read/watch We Were Liars first?

Lockhart: We Fell Apart is a standalone story in the same universe. And in that standalone story, there are many secrets of the Sinclair family that get revealed.