The bestselling mystery novels come to life in twist-filled drama We Were Liars
Cadence Sinclair Eastman has been coming to her family’s private island off the coast of Massachusetts since the summer she was born. Every year, she reunites with her cousins Johnny and Mirren, and their childhood friend Gat, and the tightknit group spends the season engaging in low-key mischief. But when an accident during her 15th summer strips the girl of her memory, Cadence returns to Beechwood Island looking for answers. Her biggest question: Why hasn’t she heard from her best friends in a year?
Based on the highly praised YA psychological horror novel penned by E. Lockhart, We Were Liars has been adapted into a limited series by Vampire Diaries producer Julie Plec and Roswell reboot creator Carina Adly Mackenzie. “The source material was so beautiful to read,” says Plec. “It makes you feel like you’re living in memories. You want to live those memories and be on this island with all of your best friends. And of course, what better story to tell than one that starts happy and then takes a long, dark tour into the woods of twists and thrills?”
The pieces of the series are held together by Emily Alyn Lind as Cadence. Perhaps best known as young Amanda Clarke on Revenge, Lind is now in her early 20s and, after more than 10 audition callbacks for We Were Liars, was seen as the right person to anchor her own show. “We were looking for somebody who could believably play both sides of Cadence: the bright, sunny, carefree — sometimes a little careless — innocent, falling-in-love-for-the-first-time Cadence, and then a much more weary and jaded version,” says Mackenzie. “Emily brought that.”
Keeping track of the non-linear events, along with the added challenge of the duality of her character, kept Lind on her toes throughout the shoot. “The story’s very messy, and Cadence, as a narrator, is unreliable, which is really interesting,” the actress explains. “If you were to put yourself in Cadence’s shoes, you understand why she would be so confused, why this would be complicated, and why she would feel like she was being gaslit. I really used that [in my performance].” To feel grounded in the middle of the confusion, the Nova Scotian shooting location played a key part. “We were really isolated and it was very dreamlike but also haunting — these places right on the sea, miles and miles away from anything. We were stuck with ourselves and these beautiful homes and felt very immersed in the story,” says Lind.
While the eight-part show is very much a mystery, many of the cast members were there to explore deeper themes of family. The Sinclairs are a seemingly perfect, privileged lot. Like most dynasties, however, they harbour all kinds of secrets. “These are damaged, complicated, messy women,” says Caitlin FitzGerald, who plays Cadence’s mother Penny, one the three Sinclair sisters. For FitzGerald, the scripts — combining two of Lockhart’s novels related to the Sinclair family — were the real draw. “Often in shows, it’s either the teenagers or the adults, and these scripts really read as teenagers and adults,” she explained. “Everybody got really juicy stuff to play. Everybody was fleshed out and complicated and it was really gratifying to play the moms. Someone said, ‘We don’t just make sandwiches.’ It was really nice to be nasty.”
Not everyone was interested in portraying a bad guy. David Morse, who often plays the antagonist, wanted to make sure there was more to the Sinclair patriarch than met the eye. “I’ve been asked to play characters similar to him, these powerful men who are self-interested and can easily become one-note,” he says. “When I talked to Carina and Julie, we talked about Harris in a much more nuanced way. The man adored his wife and really adored his grandchildren. His children he’s not so happy with, but at one time he adored them, too. He’s created this paradise for this family, an escape from the media world, and he wants it to be a happy place. When he’s forced to behave in other ways, that he doesn’t want to have to behave, that’s what was interesting to me.”
Equally, the series is an exploration of young love, especially that between Cadence and Gat, played by Shubham Maheshwari, who visits the island with his uncle Ed (Rahul Kohli) and Ed’s partner, Carrie Sinclair (Mamie Gummer). “To Gat, Cady was a happy place. He met her when his dad passed away and he associates Cadence with something that pulls him away from that sadness,” says Maheshwari, adding that the show also touches on important, universal themes. “We talk about grief, we talk about wealth and how that changes the way people treat others. And, also, that feeling of being an outsider and trying to fit in. I think everybody will relate to something and take away something from it. That’s why this is so beautiful.”
We Were Liars, streaming on Prime Video