Here’s Everything We Know About The We Were Liars TV Adaptation!
Cadence Sinclair is the eldest granddaughter of a wealthy family who summer on a private island every year. That is until she turns 15 and suffers a traumatic brain injury. Two years later, she’s back on the island trying to piece everything together… but nothing will ever be the same again. We Were Liars and its prequel Family of Liars by E. Lockhart took BookTok readers by storm, leading TV creators Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie on a journey since the first book came out in 2014 to bring the story to life.
Now we finally know the cast bringing this haunting mystery to our TV screens! Making up our “Liars” are Emily Alyn Lind as Cadence, who is trying to piece together how she went from a summer fling one summer to a near-death experience the next. Then there’s Esther McGregor who plays her artist cousin Mirren, Joseph Zada as her reckless ringerleader of a cousin Johnny, and Shubham Maheshwari as her love interest Gat. Alongside the “Liars” are the adults with Mamie Gummer as Carrie, Caitlin FitzGerald as Penny, Candice King as Bess, David Morse as Harris, Wendy Crewson as Tipper, and Rahul Kohli as Ed.
Plec told Pop Culture Planet about getting the rights to adapt We Were Liars back at New York Comic Con in 2022. “I cannot wait to bring that to the screen. That’s one of those books you don’t mess with!” she said. “Yet it needs more story in order to become a whole season of television. It needs more than what’s in there.”
With two books to pull material from — and a third on the way with We Fell Apart hitting bookstores on November 4 — the We Were Liars world offers a rich backstory on the Sinclair family to explore. “What we’re going to do is keep the two stories separate, but we're going to use the first season — which is like the We Were Liars season — to really introduce and build out the aunts and the mom, Penny, Carrie, and Bess, those characters, so that they're fully realized women and fully realized characters in season one,” Plec revealed. “That [way] when we go back and tell the story of their childhood in season two you really will be rooting for them and wanting to know more about them.”
While the duo are best known for supernatural series like Roswell, New Mexico, The Vampire Diaries, and its spin offs, they’re eager to take the dark family mystery full of privilege and unreliable narrators on. “It's having to tell those kind of stories I always want to tell, which is romance and family drama and friendship drama, [but] without being able to rely on the genre tricks. Like if this seems boring, drop a werewolf attack into it. If you want to up this conversation between two people have them do a magic spell. There's so many tricks that make writing easier when you're working in the genre space,” she said. “But that being said there is a mystery at the core of We Were Liars and that is sort of the substitute for a genre moment in that you're always going to feel that tension represented by the question of what happens and what is the solution to this mystery in that story. So it's not like I'm writing completely without a net. I still have some gimmicks in there that I can rely on, in a good way.”
Catch We Were Liars when it premieres June 18 on Prime Video.
