We Were Liars Behind The Scenes Facts And Details

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With a surprising twist that "wrecked" viewers and a book that kept readers talking for over a decade, We Were Liars is taking the world by storm.
I recently sat down with author E. Lockhart to learn all about the adaptation, differences in the novel, the casting process, and so much more! Here are a few behind-the-scenes facts you might not know:
We Were Liars was originally going to be adapted into a movie.
"We Were Liars has been in development since the book came out in 2014. First, it was for a feature. It had five different writers and two different directors. Then it was in development for TV at another [streaming service] that didn't end up going, and then it landed with Julie Pleck and Carina Mackenzie."
Showrunners Julie Plec and Carina Adly Mackenzie ensured the writer's room was diverse. They purposely enlisted some Indian writers to make sure Gat (one of the main characters) was portrayed authentically and dynamically.
"We had a writer's room, as you do on a television show, and one of the things that Plec and Mackenzie did was bring in not just a diverse group of writers, as you might have on any show, but also four writers of Indian descent who had all kinds of cool skills as storytellers. They had comedy chops, thriller chops, all of that, but they were also generous with their lived experience, and so they fleshed out the characters of Gat and Ed with a lot more nuance and authenticity. You hear a lot more from Gat and Ed in the show than you do in the book, and you understand their perspectives and how things feel to them much more deeply."
If you recognized Julie's name, it's probably because she brought us the hit TV shows, The Vampire Diaries and The Originals.
Julie reunited with former TVD star Candice King, who played my fave Caroline Forbes on the show. In We Were Liars, Candice stars as Bess Sinclair, mother to Mirren and the littles (Taft and Liberty). She is also the youngest of the Sinclair sisters.
And Carina kicked off her professional TV writing career with The Vampire Diaries spinoff.
That's right! Carina and Julie have worked together in the past. Carina was a writer's assistant for Julie's original series, The Originals. Candice made appearances in this spinoff as well, so the three were very familiar with each other before We Were Liars filming began. Carina would later create the popular sci-fi drama Roswell, New Mexico for The CW, which was a reboot of the original series Roswell.
We Were Liars author E. Lockhart wrote the finale episode in the series.
"I came in just to write the finale. So I came into the writer's room for two weeks, worked on the finale structure with the writer's room, and then went off to do my writing," Lockhart explained."I have written a couple pilots for streamers, but none of them have ever been made, so this is my first piece of filmed television writing. I was on set for all of the filming and had the most amazing time with director Erica Dunton, who did Episodes 7 and 8. It was just a fantastic education in seeing how all these little pieces of a big action set piece that are filmed separately from one another can then be threaded together into a seamless piece of storytelling."
The background story for the mothers in We Were Liars is based on E. Lockhart's prequel book, Family of Liars.
"I wrote a second novel in the We Were Liars universe that's called Family of Liars, and that novel is the story of what the moms in We Were Liars did back when they were teenagers. It basically answers the question, 'Why are these women such hot messes?' And so Plec and Mackenzie created new narratives for those characters, but it was always true to the story that they had read in Family of Liars. So they built those characters from Family of Liars into these complicated women that you see on screen, and I think that it's a multi-generational family soap."
They received over 1,000 audition submissions for the roles of The Liars (the four lead characters).
"I don't know exactly what they sent in, but let's say it was a headshot and a resume that they had to send to the casting directors, and then the casting directors sorted through all of those, and we got thousands of submissions, and they invited people who had maybe the right look, maybe the right vibe, maybe some interesting experience, to send in audition videos, and one of those people was Shubham Maheshwari, who plays Gat."As for the rest of The Liars , Joseph Zada will be seen next as young Haymitch in the upcoming Hunger Games movie. Meanwhile, Emily Alyn Lind previously starred in the Gossip Girl reboot, and is the daughter of Barbara Alyn Woods, who starred as Deb in One Tree Hill. And Esther McGregor is the daughter of Ewan McGregor.
This is Shubham Maheshwari's debut acting role.
"He had never been in a show before. He'd been in student films. He was graduating from college with a degree in economics and ready to go to work in an office. He sent in his picture, or whatever. Then he sent in a video. The video was good enough that we saw it. We liked him. He kept coming back. He came back approximately 1,000 times. He got better every time. He was auditioning from his dorm room in college, and in the end, we chemistry read, shoved together with, I think, three or four other guys that we were interested in.I just remember this feeling of like, 'Oh, okay. He's really got it. He's got this character. He understands this guy, he's and he's really magical on screen.' I hope you feel the same."
Joseph Zada (who played Johnny) improvised his Tom Cruise/Risky Business impersonation in the series.
"At one point in the script, it says that Johnny (played by Joseph Zada) slides across the dining room floor in his socks and knocks a statue over. When the other liars are like, 'What are you doing?' He's like, 'I'm doing the Tom Cruise Risky Business slide.' And that's all it said in the script. Joe was like, 'I can do better than that.' So, at his initiation, he planned out this iconic Tom Cruise dance number homage, which he does, in a pink shirt and all that. It is super, super delightful and funny. And it really came from him, his joy in performing, and his understanding of this character, and how this character goes all out to the max, even when he's alone in a room."
There's a time difference from when the incident takes place in the book versus when it happens in the series.
"Nobody wants to watch underage people making out [laughs]. If that's what you want to watch, you are not my friend. So, we cast actors who are all fully of age, and we wanted them to look a little bit older. Also, it's a sophisticated show with sophisticated themes, and so it made more sense for them not to be two years apart in the two different time periods, but to be only a single year apart."
E. Lockhart was very hands-on with the development of the series, while also allowing Plec and Mackenzie to flex their creative wings.
"There was a development room for this show before Plec went off to write the pilot. I was in that room for 10 weeks, and that was really a room for conversations about what all the options were for making this into a television show. How was it going to be best structured? What were the pitfalls that we wanted to avoid? What were the most important themes? How could these characters be fleshed out and still stay true to the spirit of the book, and so on? But once that was done, they went away and created the real writer's room and wrote the show."
It took a while for E. Lockhart to finish writing the ending of the novel.
"In the case of We Were Liars, the novel, it was pretty late in the process that I really got the emotion of the ending of the story onto the page. My editor kept kind of coming back with the last few pages and saying, 'Go deeper.' Finally, one day, I kind of, I don't know why, but I could do it, and I did something that I was proud of, and that's what you see in the book."
The costume designs went through alot of changes.
"We had five different versions of that blue and red dress, some with big, wide skirts; one that was a breakaway; one that the stunt person was going to wear; one that got put on a dummy and lit on fire, and so on. All those happened at different times, and yet, what you see is Emily Lind running through the flames and out onto the lawn. All this took several weeks at all these different points — seamstresses staying up all night, and designer fabric brought in from the US (we were filming in Canada)."
The book had a successful run on BookTok.
"There was a huge resurgence on TikTok in 2020, during the pandemic. I think the biggest reason that happened was that this is a book full of big feelings, and some people threw the book across the room. Other people sobbed their eyes out. Other people had some other kind of reaction, but it was always a big reaction, and I think especially during the pandemic, when people were isolated from the big feelings, from the drama with their friends, from the big romances that crash and burn or swoop them off their feet, they were really craving that big amount of emotional feeling from their books. And that was also true of books like Song of Achilles, or They Both Die at the End. Those are also books that became very popular at that time through TikTok videos, because they made people feel, and so I think that's what our show is offering."
Lastly, the Scrabble scene was very emotional for the cast to film.
"There was one day when we filmed them around the Scrabble table, and all four of them cried for about five hours straight while filming, like they just never stopped crying. I just felt so amazed at their skill and their generosity of spirit and their vulnerability as actors."
What have you liked or disliked most about the adaptation? Let's chat in the comments!