What is love? How do the relationships we have early in our lives affect us for years to come?
Meaghan Oppenheimer is a screenwriter, executive producer, and showrunner who tells stories driven by flawed, deeply human characters and the relationships between them. She’s behind Hulu’s drama series Tell Me Lies, starring Grace Van Patten and Jackson White and adapted from Carola Lovering’s novel of the same name. Her earlier projects include the 2015 film We Are Your Friends, starring Zac Efron as a passionate young DJ, and the 2018 drama series Queen America, set in Oppenheimer’s hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma and starring Catherine Zeta-Jones. Season 2 of Tell Me Lies will premiere September 4th on Hulu. Oppenheimer is also currently developing the upcoming Hulu show Second Wife, to star Tom Ellis and Emma Roberts.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
For those who haven't seen season one of Tell Me Lies, just give us a little bit of background on Lucy and Stephen and their circle of friends.
MEAGHAN OPPENHEIMER
Tell Me Lies really is about obsessive love and the ramifications of the things that we do to ourselves and to other people when we allow ourselves to get completely lost inside of another person. It’s also a coming of age story about people who are experiencing sexual awakenings and love, or what they think is love, for the first time. You have Lucy, a college freshman who is sort of emotionally stunted because of a few things in her life, and she meets Stephen, who is a very charming narcissist, who has a lot of his own issues. So the show is about her getting completely entangled in this obsession with him, and the way that it pulls her further and further away from herself, and causes her to really undermine her own happiness and throw away any power that she has. She ends up betraying a lot of friendships; the rest of the cast make up their college friends.
Season one is definitely more of a love story than season two is. I keep saying season one is the love story, season two is sort of a war story. It’s about these college kids who are making these choices that in the moment seem very mundane, but have much bigger consequences later on. Often when people write or make movies about romances with young adults, I think they are very flippant about it and don't take it seriously. But I think that those friendships and romantic relationships are some of the most important ones because they really set the stage for the rest of our lives. If your first relationship is incredibly toxic and damaging, it can take you years to figure out that that's not normal, and that that's not actually how relationships are meant to be.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
You weave stories so well that your audience can imagine themselves into these situations they have never experienced themselves. What does your writing and creative process look like?
MEAGHAN OPPENHEIMER
There’s a lot of sitting alone in a room and just thinking about crazy ideas. I spend a lot of time just listening to music and coming up with stories. I think with this show, there's an element where I’ve found our audience really wants to be shocked. I also found this when we were writing the first season; you hand things in to the Hulu executives and the 20th executives and people really liked to be completely surprised and completely shocked. And so it sort of became this game of, how can we do something that lives in the real world - that is believable enough that it could have happened or has happened to people we know - but then turn it up a notch so it really catches people off guard. It’s been fun to try to put things in the show that people don't see coming. It's hard to do that nowadays.
But for the most part, I just always try to think about, who is this character? What do they want? Thinking about what a character wants is always the first drive, because everything we do comes from something we want, whether we're telling the truth or lying, whether it's conscious or subconscious. If you just try to think about, ‘what does this character want, and what are they willing to do to get it?’ then you can let the plot unfold organically.
I acted as a kid, and it definitely was what taught me how to write, because I was always reading scripts and reading plays. I learned a lot about what actually feels realistic to say and what doesn't. I think a mistake that a lot of writers make is they don't say any of the words out loud, and so when someone actually says it out loud, you realize, these words don't even fit in my mouth. Certain sentences literally feel awkward and you realize no one would ever speak this way. And so as I'm writing, I'm definitely quietly whispering everything to myself, not acting it out, but just making sure it feels like it can flow, and that it won't be too difficult for an actor to actually say. I'm not always trying to get into the mind of each character, I'm not stepping into their psyche, but with all of them I’m thinking, what do I relate to about this character? And if I don't relate to them, who do I know that feels similar, and what would that person do? So I always have to draw on my own experiences, or people that I know. I pretty much always do. I write about relationships and love and family, and while the stories are not autobiographical, the emotions are. Pretty much all the emotions that are in Tell Me Lies are things that I have felt before to different degrees.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
What is it like writing for actors you know, like Grace Van Patten and Jackson White in Tell Me Lies, who are also in a relationship in real life, and your husband Tom Ellis? How much are you drawing on different things you've learned about these actors along the way - their energies and what they bring to a project - so that you can write to their strengths?
MEAGHAN OPPENHEIMER
The whole Tell Me Lies cast, they're all my friends, I know them all. I know their real lives, and I have to put that completely to the side when I'm writing. I have to be very, very disciplined about not mixing those two in my mind and not confusing what Grace would do and what Lucy would do, because they're so different. But with that said, I think once you start working with a character or with an actor, writing their dialogue, you know what the actor's voice sounds like and what their mannerisms are and the tone of their voice. You know how it will sound in their mouth. So writing towards the strengths of different actors, I think, is something you have to learn how to do. I loved the first season, but that’s why I do think the second season is much better. Knowing who these characters were and knowing what everyone's strengths were was very helpful, like knowing with Grace that she's able to say so much without saying anything. Her face is just so expressive. There were times where I would get a note like, can you explain this moment more? And I’d say, you'll be able to see it on Grace's face. It's nice knowing you have an actor like that.
On Nurturing Education and the Importance of the Arts
English and theater were always the subjects I gravitated towards, and history, because history is just one big story. I had a teacher named Gary Sweeney at Holland Hall, who is one of the most impactful people I've met. He gave me a love of theater that I didn't have before, and showed me texts and plays that I never would have come across as a teenager in Tulsa.
I had a great education, but I think there was also a structure that could be very rigid. There was so much that I stressed over as a kid that didn't end up mattering; the hours of homework or the stakes around a math test or a science quiz. And I think there are schools now that are changing it, but I do wish there was a way to educate young people without giving them the anxieties of an adult, and allowing them to still be kids without this feeling of, if I fail this test, my entire life is going to be over, because it’s not. I have a nine-month-old baby, and we talk a lot about when we put her in school, trying to find a more alternative education where she is able to learn what she needs to learn, but also to love learning, not just putting in hours for hours’ sake.
In terms of educating people about art and teaching art, I worked with girls who were at a home, many of them were orphans, and they had really been taught to not take up space and to be quiet and inwards. Watching the way that they blossomed by doing performance - the way it teaches you to be loud and use your voice and take up space - they didn’t want to become actors or playwrights, but it was just incredibly liberating for them. I can't imagine what I would be like if I hadn't been involved in some level of art as a kid, because I think it taught me how to find my voice and also understand people who are very different from me.
Storytelling is the most important thing in my life. I think it's how we learn about ourselves. I think it's how we learn to empathize with other people. We can't experience everything someone is, everyone in the world is going through, but we can read a book about it and open our brains up to a different corner of the human experience that we would never have contact with in our day-to-day lives. Building empathy is one of the most important outcomes of art.
