Exclusive
How Bree & Wrigley Became the Heart of ‘Tell Me Lies’ Final Season
What To Know
- Bree and Wrigley’s romance became the emotional core of Tell Me Lies’ third and final season.
- Spencer House and Cat Missal spoke with Swooon about Bree and Wrigley’s evolution from 2009 to 2015.
[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Tell Me Lies series finale.]
In a world full of dark secrets, death, and Stephen DeMarco, Tell Me Lies gave us a love story soaked with light and hope that became the show’s beating heart in its third and final season. Bree and Wrigley’s smoldering, yearning-fueled, miscommunication-filled romance in Season 3 had us hooked from the moment they had their MDMA-laced heart-to-heart at the bus stop.
From then on, Bree and Wrigley had an ease with one another that they didn’t have with anyone else in their friend group. That aperture of vulnerability gave them space to be honest with each other about everything from Drew’s death to Bree’s complicated relationship with her mother.
Bree and Wrigley found themselves in the same photography class at Baird, which inspired Swooon’s Tell Me Lies series finale feature with Cat Missal and Spencer House.
Avery Thompson / Disney / Ian Watson
Prior to the third season, Bree and Wrigley had only shared a handful of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scenes and never anything one-on-one. However, the groundwork for the Brigley relationship was laid in the Tell Me Lies pilot during their very first interaction, when Wrigley walked up to hug Bree and yelled, “I’m going to steal your wife!” at her wedding.
While most viewers (not all!) thought this was just Wrigley being goofy and lovable, that line wasn’t originally in the script. House actually added this line himself, which makes sense considering he was the only one to know about the potential of a Bree and Wrigley endgame from the start. “It was kind of thrown out there, and it was a little moment of like, ‘Are we gonna keep that?'” House said about the “steal your wife” line.
Missal never knew a thing about Bree and Wrigley until Season 3. “Why didn’t you just tell me?” Missal asked House, who then explained that he thought his costar would possibly spill the Brigley beans before it ever came to fruition.
Secret Moments in a Crowded Room
While their relationship started out purely platonic, anyone within a 20-mile radius of their television could sense the undeniable chemistry between Wrigley and Bree, anchored by House and Missal’s compelling, nuanced performances. It wasn’t until Season 3’s Episode 4 that Tell Me Lies began to acknowledge the romantic feelings between them when they couldn’t stop looking at each other on the dance floor after Bree had married Evan (Branden Cook).
Matt Stevens
Wrigley indirectly admitted to Pippa (Sonia Mena) that he was in love with Bree as he watched her longingly from across the room, with Bree doing the same, despite being in the arms of her new husband. Their yearning was on such display that Stephen (Jackson White) immediately smelled blood in the water. A quick peek at Wrigley’s unlocked phone confirmed to him that Wrigley and Bree had been hooking up for months, which he didn’t reveal until his wedding monologue in the series finale.
Missal and House admitted that the wedding scene in Episode 4 took “so long” to film. “That was a very long week. That was a crazy week, 15-hour days, and we were at the end of the week and kind of losing our minds,” House said. “And I just, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it without smiling, laughing.”
On top of the longing, Missal noted that there’s a “camaraderie between them while everything is falling apart, which I think speaks to their relationship, that it’s like a real, deep relationship.”
A Deep (End) Love
The following episode saw Bree and Wrigley head into the deep end — quite literally — regarding their budding feelings. After a road trip to meet up with Bree’s mom (Emily Meade), Bree revealed that she’d never learned how to swim in the deep end as a kid, which Wrigley immediately wanted to rectify.
They nearly shared a kiss in the pool, but they pulled away before anything could happen. This almost-kiss created a crackling tension that carried over into Valentine’s Day. Their frustration with their current situations and confusion over their feelings boiled over, but that invisible string kept pulling them back to each other. After staying the night at Marianne (Gabriella Pession) and Oliver’s (Tom Ellis) house, Bree called the one person she needed the next morning: Wrigley.
In the early hours of dawn, Bree and Wrigley finally confessed their feelings and kissed for the first time. “I feel like this could be something good,” Bree said. For the first time in her life, Bree knew this moment, these feelings, felt right. However, an ill-timed breakup and Wrigley’s subsequent sympathy sex with Pippa derailed Bree and Wrigley’s road to happiness.
Bree went back to Evan and even confronted him about hooking up with Lucy (Grace Van Patten) her freshman year. He admitted his mistake, and Bree resigned herself to a safe life with him. As Marianne had told her, it’s better to “be with someone who loves you a little more than you love them.” Bree’s love with Evan would always be safely in the shallow end, and she needed that security.
“Those words ring in her mind when she decides to go back to Evan. Obviously, Wrigley does something that hurts her, and she feels like she’s got no one else, but also she knows that Evan will love her if she chooses to be with him,” Missal explained.
A Second Chance
Bree and Evan’s wedding descended into chaos in the series finale. The opening moments of the final episode revealed the moment Bree and Wrigley started hooking up in 2015, just after Bree and Evan’s engagement party. Wrigley demanded to know why Bree never gave him another chance all those years ago. Once they both realized they’d never stopped thinking about each other, they fell into the deep end together.
Matt Stevens
In the later hours of the wedding reception months later, Stephen put all the puzzle pieces of this fractured friend group’s secrets together. He even figured out that Bree released the tape of Lucy that got her expelled from Baird. (One thing he never figured out? Wrigley was the one who got Stephen’s Yale Law admission rescinded. Talk about silent hero material.)
Stephen knew he had one moment to spill all the tea, and he took it. He grabbed the mic and proceeded to share everything he knew, including Bree’s betrayal and her ongoing affair with Wrigley. This was Bree’s breaking point. As Britney Spears‘ “Toxic” played, she chased Stephen around the reception floor and threw her wedding cake at him. From there, the mayhem continued. Evan went to tackle Stephen, only to find himself face down in his own wedding cake.
“It was a group thing. We choreographed it beforehand, and it was so much fun to shoot,” Missal recalled. “I mean, it was like all of us kind of walking counterclockwise, running from each other, cake thrown. I didn’t know ‘Toxic’ was put in there, though; that’s so fun.”
House revealed that Cook actually “wrecked his leg” shooting that final wedding scene. “When he ran at the table, the table just nailed his leg. He had some problems for a while, but it looked great,” House said, with Missal adding that Cook “had fun” getting all caked up. “I asked him, he said it was worth it,” House said.
Avery Thompson
As Evan screamed in Wrigley’s face, Wrigley just took it like a champ as he looked at Bree, who was smiling at him. Now that the dust was finally settling after six years, Bree and Wrigley were finally on the same page about being together. “It’s rock bottom, so where else could you go?” Missal said. The only place to go is up, and they can do that together.
“I like to think that they have a happy ending, and that look between them is them realizing, ‘OK, amongst all this carnage, we are going to finally give each other a chance for real.’ But I think that friend group had to explode and disintegrate for that to clear the path for that even to happen,” showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer told Swooon.
Lives are upended, tears have been shed, and the cake is ruined, but Bree and Wrigley are still standing. And that final look between them is confirmation that they have finally found their golden hour after six years of keeping their feelings in the shadows, their smiles silent promises that they’ll find a way to stand in the light together. Hopefully forever.
Tell Me Lies, All Seasons, Streaming Now, Hulu
