Exclusive Interview
Would ‘We Were Liars’ Season 2 Follow ‘Family of Liars’ Prequel Book? Creators Spill
[Warning: The following interview contains MAJOR spoilers for We Were Liars Season 1.]
When it comes to book-to-screen adaptations, Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie are the dynamic duo you want to see behind the wheel.
As it turns out, Plec and MacKenzie, best known for their work together on The Vampire Diaries spinoff The Originals, have been seeking the rights to their most recent TV adaptation, We Were Liars, for over a decade, having been fans of the book since it came out in 2014.
“I read it, I cried,” MacKenzie told Swooon. “I tweeted Emily Lockhart, and was just like, ‘Hi, I love your novel.’ Like, really nerdy.” Of course, looking back, the post wasn’t quite as cut and dry. According to her “how it started -> how it’s going” post, on February 9, 2014, MacKenzie actually wrote: “@elockhart Just read We Were Liars, wanted to thank you. It’s going to resonate in my bones for a very long time. Thank you, thank you.”
After reading the novel, MacKenzie passed her copy to Plec. “Julie was going on vacation, so I gave her the book at work to read,” MacKenzie revealed. “I wasn’t thinking about making it into a show. I was just like, ‘Here, go cry.’ And Julie was thinking about TV shows.”
Jessie Redmond / Prime
“I think that the best storytelling is the storytelling that moves you to feel something so powerful that you maybe access emotions that you’ve tucked away or tried to keep tamped down,” Plec admitted. “And so when you read a book that does that for you, you just kind of want to share it with the world in any format you possibly can. And since my particular medium is television, I wanted to be the one who got to do that.”
For both MacKenzie and Plec, reading We Were Liars meant instantly falling in love with the story. Plec recalled, “I thought, ‘Well, one day, if I can have the honor to bring this to the small screen, it would be top of my bucket list.'” Eleven years later, Plec was finally able to check that dream off that list.
“We had a couple of attempts. We were under deals at Warner Bros,, and Netflix snaked it from us, but we had a really good meeting with Emily Lockhart at that time,” MacKenzie explained. “During the pandemic, when I suddenly had so much time on my hands, I reached out to Emily, and I was like, ‘Okay, We Were Liars is the one that got away, but what else do you have?'” Ultimately, E. Lockhart started to work with MacKenzie and Plec on a different project, but “Emily let it slip that We Were Liars was available again after lots and lots and lots of people had tried to adapt it.” The rest, as they say, is history.
Unlike the creators of many other teen dramas, MacKenzie and Plec were committed to casting the show by working their “way down the family tree,” making the first role they cast Harris Sinclair. “It was really important to Julie specifically that we not cast this show like a lot of YA shows are cast, which is that you blow your whole budget on the teen characters and then kind of scrape together whatever you can for adults that kind of look like them,” MacKenzie told Swooon. “We knew we really needed a powerful grounding force in this character. We had big aspirations for this character. We needed a very complicated man to put it in a non-spoilery way.” When they met David Morse (The Green Mile), they were convinced a “big movie star” wouldn’t accept the role; however, after reading the books and meeting with the We Were Liars team, Morse took on the role of the Sinclair patriarch.
For anyone who’s read We Were Liars, you’ll know that Lockhart packs a mighty punch for a fairly short book. According to Plec, expanding the story for TV “wasn’t hard once we released ourselves from the first-person narrative of the novel. Cadence [played by Emily Alyn Lind] is telling a story about her own experience and her own relationships with these 9 or 10 people. And that means we had 9 or 10 people to create worlds about and give personalities to and histories to and build juicy, wonderful stories for. So that takes up a lot of time.” Both Plec and MacKenzie shared that they would have “happily done twice as many [episodes] over the course of the season, just to be able to live longer and dig deeper into all of the characters. Hopefully, a Season 2 will fix that problem, and we’ll be able to really revel in the stories of, for example, the Sinclair sisters.”
When it came to fully fleshing out the characters, who they met in the book, both Plec and MacKenzie had their favorites. “I loved shaping the Sinclair sisters [played by Mamie Gummer, Candice King, and Caitlin Fitzgerald],” Plec revealed to Swooon, “because they’re not always nice people, and they aren’t always kind to each other, and often they’re not even necessarily kind to their kids. And yet, the end of the season, you also understand that these women lose their children, and that is the worst thing that can happen to a human being… I loved pushing them to the edge of being almost irredeemable, and then reeling them back and regrounding them in an empathetic place.”
For a similar reason, MacKenzie chose Joseph Zada‘s character, Johnny. She shared, “I got really into reading about the Kennedys while we were working on [We Were Liars].” Noting that almost every rich family has “these sorts of boys that get into terrible trouble and never take accountability.” For Zada’s character, MacKenzie wanted to add a layer of that presumed invincibility, while still giving him “the hope for redemption.”
As it turns out, Johnny may be the only Liar (other than Cadence) whose story can continue beyond Season 1. While Lockhart did not reveal that Carrie can see her son’s ghost until her second book, Family of Liars, Plec and MacKenzie thought it was a necessary eleventh-hour Season 1 twist. As Plec put it, “Really, we just wanted the audience to know that the story didn’t have to be over. [They] know that there’s a party that can keep going if they’re enjoying themselves. So hopefully they did enjoy themselves and beg for more.”
Seeing the Family of Liars influence during the first season, we had to ask if they planned on making the second book the focus of Season 2. Plec responded, “That’s the direction that we’ve planted the seeds for, for sure, [especially] with Bess’ line [of], ‘This might be punishment for the summer I turned 16.'” MacKenzie added, “One of our big intentions in building out the sisters the way that we did was that hopefully viewers will want to know how these villainous women became [the people that they are].” So, viewers should campaign for Season 2 if they want to see “the Sinclair sister villain origin story.”
However, you shouldn’t get too worried that a Mom-centric Season 2 would mean that you won’t be seeing Cadence again. MacKenzie assured us, “We do love our present-day cast. We wouldn’t want them to go anywhere either.” While Season 2 could follow in Family of Liars‘ lead, “things can change along the way.”
Would you tune in to We Were Liars Season 2? Comment below!
We Were Liars, Season 1, Streaming Now, Prime Video
