Spoilers for the Tell Me Lies series finale ahead.
There’s not a lot that the internet—and fandoms in particular—are in agreement on. So it feels notable that viewers of Tell Me Lies, Hulu’s juicy college-set melodrama, which aired its series finale episode on February 17, have reached a consensus: the core cast of characters are terrible, despicable, nasty people.
Bree, played by Cat Missal, was the one quasi-exception to this otherwise steadfast rule, though as Missal herself notes, “The bar was pretty low.” Bree instigated a relationship with her married professor and surrounded herself with said terrible, despicable people—and still fans clung to the belief that deep down she was a Good Person. That, if anything, she was simply a victim of her circumstances.
Then the tables turned: Bree cheated on her boyfriend, Evan, with her best friend Pippa’s boyfriend, Wrigley. She then released a damning videotape in which her other best friend, Lucy, admitted to lying about being sexually assaulted, unaware that Lucy had been “protecting” Pippa. As a result Lucy was expelled from college.
After everything she’d been through—being cheated on, being gaslit by the professor and his wife, being let down by her own mother—Bree had finally snapped.
“I feel like it was fun to have that kind of spark of evil,” Missal tells Glamour of catching up to other characters’ mean streaks. “But ultimately, it’s just such a sad situation.”
As series creator Meaghan Oppenheimer (whose real-life husband, Tom Ellis, played the aforementioned married professor, Oliver), explains, “We had to push Bree to her absolute rock bottom, and have everyone in her world betray her, in order to get her to do what she does to Lucy. And also to choose to be with Evan, because she’s going to do the safest thing. Everything that she thought she could trust, including her own mom, fails her.”
Of course, people behaving badly makes for great TV, and Tell Me Lies’ success is proof positive that depravity will always be en vogue—if only because it makes us feel a little bit better about ourselves. Because we would never make the kinds of decisions that Bree does in the end. Right?
Is the line between “good” and “bad” really that thin? Says Missal, “I think that that is the point of the show.”
Below, Glamour speaks with Cat Missal about those shocking twists and turns, her favorite late-aughts costumes, and all those hair transformations.
Glamour: When did you find out that Bree was the one who screwed Lucy over, and what was your reaction to that?
Cat Missal: I found out when I got the script, which was the first couple of weeks of shooting. We were getting the scripts as we were going. I found out maybe a month into shooting, and I was like, “Oh my God, a villain arc.” Her actions are kind of justified, but also it’s so wrong and evil and completely destroys Lucy’s life. It was hard.
A lot of the other characters, everybody’s like, “They’re terrible people. Everybody’s a terrible person, except for Bree.” Were you excited to also be bad?
Yes, I was. I mean, even though Bree’s a sweet, sweet girl, this season she falls in love with Wrigley while she’s still technically with Evan and he’s with Pippa. It’s like, there’s cheating going on. It was fun to have that kind of spark of evil, but ultimately, it’s just such a sad situation.
When did you learn about the Wrigley arc?