‘Tell Me Lies’ stars Grace Van Patten and Costa D’Angelo break down Lucy and Alex’s explicit sex scenes: “Two people exploring their f***ed up s*** through their bodies”

Hulu‘s hit drama Tell Me Lies is back with its highly-anticipated third season, and the supersized premiere ended with one of the series’ most shocking sex scenes yet.

After Stephen (Jackson White) blackmailed Lucy (Grace Van Patten) into recording a damning confession on camera, her past transgressions, the emotional toll of Stephen’s abuse and the stress of not knowing what he’d do with the tape led her back at Alex’s (Costa D’Angelo) door.

Earlier in the episode, Lucy had cut her night with Alex short after he told her he couldn’t give her the reassurance she needed. But in her newly horrible headspace, she returned on a mission. During a rough, explicit end-of-episode sex scene, Lucy replayed the torturous tape in her mind and asked Alex to talk down to her while they had sex. As she laid facedown on his mattress, Alex told her she was “fucking pathetic” and “nothing.”

Fans who’ve been here since the beginning know that portraying toxic physical and emotional relationships is nothing new for Tell Me Lies, but the intense levels of psychological distress and darkness explored in Season 3 are especially tough to watch. As viewers take in Alex and Lucy’s layered sex scenes this season, they may wonder why Lucy is not only accepting, but actively seeking out, this treatment. Why is Alex embracing the role of aggressor? And what goes into filming and bringing scenes like these to screen? Decider got the answers straight from creator/showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer and stars Van Patten and D’Angelo.

“I think Lucy is searching for punishment,” Van Patten told Decider over Zoom. “I think she is so used to being treated like that authentically from Stephen, and she accepts the love she thinks she deserves. She’s looking for that. She’s trying to craft that out of this new relationship with Alex, and it’s really heartbreaking.”

“Alex is sort of a safe space for her to explore those darker impulses,” Oppenheimer added. “And he, on the flip side, is dealing with his own trauma. That’s why he’s sort of drawn to this role of aggressor, because he was in the other role. He was in the victim role earlier on in life.”

For D’Angelo, who joined the cast this season as a drug dealer at Baird who grew up in a bad foster home alongside Bree (Cat Missal), diving deeper into Alex’s backstory was essential to getting inside his character’s head.

“A lot of it was the work before we shot, in researching the foster homes and what these kids would have went through as children. For me, it was so important to know,” D’Angelo told Decider. “Then you get to set, you have to just let it go and trust that it’s there; that you’ve done the work. Especially for those big scenes, you have to listen to each other.”

In Season 3, Episode 1, Lucy told Stephen she once felt shame after she put her ex’s hand on her throat mid-argument because she wanted him to be more aggressive. “I disgusted him,” she told Stephen. “And sometimes I think about that moment and feel like maybe there’s something disgusting about me.” When Lucy placed Alex’s hand on her throat in Episode 3 and he followed her lead rather than give her that same look, she felt safe to explore those impulses even further. Though there is a level of comfort between the characters, the scenes are undoubtedly tough to watch, even for Oppenheimer.

“Watching them, it was a hard day on set for sure. It went very well and smoothly, because our director, Ed Lilly, was amazing and understood the scene. But it’s just a hard scene to watch over and over again,” Oppenheimer recalled. “We were all very aware of wanting them to feel safe. I had a lot of conversations with Grace and Costa, but especially Grace, beforehand about wanting it to not feel like we were trying to make it kinky and like we were trying to make it sexy. We really wanted it to feel like two people who are genuinely exploring their fucked up shit with each other through their bodies, and not try to make it more provocative for the sake of being. Coming from an emotional place is really important, and keeping the camera pretty tight. We didn’t need to show too much all the time.” 

While Alex and Lucy’s first sex scene was certainly the most shocking, Episode 4 featured another emotionally-charged hookup between them in a car. While getting drinks with Alex, Lucy saw her ex, Max (Edmund Donovan), across the room and recalled how horribly she’d treated him. Alex encouraged her to interrupt Max’s date and apologize, so she took his advice, told Max she was sorry, then followed Alex out to the parking lot where the two got intimate in the back seat of his car. At one point, Lucy lost her grip and said, “Oh shit, sorry.” In response, Alex urged her to say the words again, and just like that, an emotional Lucy repeatedly apologized during sex, as though she felt she need to further atone for her sins.

“I think you see how much Lucy is in pain and how much she is really disliking herself and her actions during that time,” Van Patten told Decider of her character’s quest for punishment this season.

“It is so dark,” D’Angelo said of his Alex and Lucy’s unconventional relationship. “But the writing is so great that you just let it come out and it’s brilliant. Working with Grace, she makes my life so easy. She will be breaking down and having this terrible moment, and opening up, and she could just snap out of it like that and is smiling and great. It’s such a good energy to have. You want to keep that up, because you’re shooting for so long, and it’s exhausting.”

Just as Tell Me Lies stars Cat Missal and Tom Ellis did during their Season 2 interview with Decider, D’Angelo also praised Oppenheimer and the show’s intimacy coordinator for helping making inherently uncomfortable scenes easier to film.

“The intimacy coordinator, and Grace, and I all worked super close with Meaghan as well. And she’s got such a clear vision of what she wants and where the characters are. All these sex scenes are just the characters expressing themselves physically where they’re at mentally, their trauma, and how they how with it. And as young people, they’re dealing with it through sex,” D’Angelo said. “It was great. It was scary. And it was exciting. It’s all those things that you want. And I think it really came through in the show.”

New episodes of Tell Me Lies Season 3 premiere Tuesdays on Hulu.