SPOILER ALERT! This post contains details from all episodes of Prime Video‘s We Were Liars.
Prime Video’s We Were Liars paints a multi-generational portrait of a privileged family whose secrets seem to keep coming back to haunt them no matter how deeply they think they’ve been buried.
Much of the action in this first season centers on the four teenage Liars, particularly 17-year-old Cadence’s (Emily Alyn Lind) quest to understand what happened to her the previous summer that left her barely clothed on the beach one night on her family’s private Beechwood Island. But, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Pulling in threads from author E. Lockhart’s prequel novel Family of Liars, the Prime Video adaptation of the 2014 We Were Liars also gives audiences a deeper understanding of the adult relationships within the family, which are just as messy (if not more so).
“Often, whether we want to admit it or not, it’s quite impossible to go home and be with your family and not have this regression back into somewhat of a childlike or teenage version of yourself. We all inevitably do it one way or another,” Candice King, who plays the youngest Sinclair sister Bess, tells Deadline.
That’s exactly how Bess and her sisters Carrie (Mamie Gummer) and Penny (Caitlin Fitzgerald) behave on Beechwood, even at times dragging their own children into the messes they’ve made as they fight over everything from their dad’s affection to their mother’s precious black pearl necklace.
In the interview below, King unpacks Bess’ journey in Season 1 of We Were Liars and teases what she’d like to explore in a potential second season.
DEADLINE: Julie Plec has spoken a lot about how she’s envisioned you as Bess for years, to the point that she wrote the character with your casting in mind. When did you start to hear about this character and discuss being part of the show?
CANDICE KING: I had heard about We Were Liars, I want to say, in 2020 knowing that Carina and Julie had really wanted to bring this book to TV, and this was a project that they were both very passionate about. So at that point, it was just hearing about it as a friend and creatively. I love what they do. My favorite thing is just to sit there and listen to them talk about ideas. So all these years later, the opportunity to audition for Bess was something that I obviously was very, very excited for. Then to hear Julie say that she had written the character in my voice was obviously the biggest compliment that I could ever receive. So it feels like the stars really aligned for this project, not only creatively, but just personally as well. It was something that I was incredibly excited to be a part of, not only because I truly think that Julie Plec and Carina Mackenzie are just so good at what they do, the storytelling that they bring to television and the passion that they have for the storytelling. But also, I had read the book and the source material just stopped me in my tracks and had me crying just like everyone else at the end, and I wanted to watch this show, so to be a part of it was a dream come true.
DEADLINE: What was your sense of Bess from reading the book?
KING: Well, Bess isn’t as featured in the book We Were Liars. We get to know the sisters more in Family of Liars, which is the second book, and technically the prequel to the story. So, I mean, it was nice to see that the characters were expanded upon for the show. As far as Bess within the series, I loved the way that she was described in the pages. There was one part where Emily Lockhart describes her as like a box of sharpened pencils. That description has resonated with me, that she just is already ready to go, perfectly organized, ready to serve the greater purpose of what she is needed to do for the others around her. Also, very classic and old school. She’s not a pen. She’s not a gel pen. She’s a sharpened pencil.
What I liked about her, specifically this season and her own personal unraveling within Summer 16, is just how much she started to resent the fact that she starts the season off with a sense of pride of what she does for everybody else. Then, it just slowly eats away at her. It is her own doing, and it leads to her own unraveling, her own temper tantrums, where she sees herself as this adult and the only one of the sisters who is in control of her life. The reality is that you can’t curate happiness. You can curate your life all you want, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be happy inside. So for her the unraveling and her learning that lesson this season, I found really wonderful and I think cathartic for a lot of people in a time when we’re obsessed with the highlight reel of everybody’s life on social media.
DEADLINE: Another character who is not in the original novel but is referenced in the prequel and in the series is the fourth Sinclair sister, Rosemary, who died as a child. How does Rosemary’s ‘presence’ loom over Bess and feed into her desire to achieve perfection?
KING: Yes, birth order was a big part of the discussion, and how, even though I think we want to think that birth order doesn’t necessarily define everyone in a family, it so often can. The show talks about grief a lot as well, and so to have their youngest sibling die in such a tragic way, I think so much of Bess’ perfectionism comes from wanting to be the one who doesn’t have any problems. She’s always what everyone needs her to be in that moment. She wears this cloak of being the baby of the family. The idea was that that’s what her mom needed, was her to kind of take that role. Maybe Tipper needed her to be the baby of the family, to fill that space and that hole, and to be the one that did everything right and didn’t cause anyone any problems and just lived her her life by the book of what would keep her parents and everyone around her as happy as possible, even if that came at the sacrifice of her own happiness. [She lost] her time to figure out what her personal identity was, instead bowing to the identity that she felt everyone needed her to be as she was growing up.
DEADLINE: I also really loved the expansion of Bess’ relationship with her own kids, especially Mirren. How did you approach those scenes with Esther McGregor, and how did they shape your understanding of Bess during those two summers?
KING: Creatively, those scenes, I was so excited to dive into them. Personally, they’re so terrible, because I love sweet Esther. If anyone is lucky enough to meet her in your lifetime, she is just this big ball of joy and light. Her laugh is so infectious, and she’s like this wonderful fairy of joy that just sprinkles her joy pixie dust everywhere. So the idea of having to say these really atrocious things to her was awful personally.
Creatively, I’m so grateful of her willingness to also be such a great scene partner in those moments where we could just go there and feel safe to really swim around in that difficult mother-daughter relationship. I think that what I really found interesting was that, we saw Bess realize that maybe she doesn’t like being a mom in the way that society wants her to be a mom, and in the way that she thought she was supposed to be in a mom in her head. Which is why, at the end, I just love so much that moment when she’s sitting with Carrie and saying, ‘I forgot to just love them.’ I think that encapsulated [that] she didn’t even understand her own identity as a mother, because it was just so in her mind of who she was supposed to be as a mother, and she was trying to curate that relationship as well. It just made her, I think, really resent being a mother. We see a toddler in a store who doesn’t want to be there anymore just throw this big temper tantrum and stomp their feet. We got to see Bess as a woman doing this as a mother, having a temper tantrum in front of her own child.
DEADLINE: This story is so multi-generational and I love that the Sinclair sisters are both adults and parents in their own right, but they are also their parents’ children. How did you reflect on all the warring familial relationships here?
KING: Yes, I think you everything you just said is what Mamie [Gummer], Caitlin [Fitzgerald] and myself were so excited about and found this as a really unique opportunity that you’re not just seeing these women as sisters or as aunts or as mothers, but you’re seeing them as daughters. Often, whether we want to admit it or not, it’s quite impossible to go home and be with your family and not have this regression back into somewhat of a childlike or teenage version of yourself. We all inevitably do it one way or another. So to be able to play with all those dynamics — I wish I could say that I had some grand part in it, but I think it really came from all of us working together and talking through the scenes together and really feeding and playing off of each other as scene partners that contributed to so much of that. Then, the writers really creating these scenes and these playgrounds where we do get to see them. I mean, I just think what pops into my head is when Harris is reprimanding his daughters at Tipper’s funeral, and the three sisters are just standing there with their head cowered down and with their eyes at the floor. That, I feel, really set the tone of like, ‘Oh, they’re the children right now.’ These are not the moms. They’re not the aunts. They’re the children being reprimanded by their father.
DEADLINE: The Vampire Diaries, I think, also explored a lot of familial dynamics that evolved throughout that franchise’s run. For most of that franchise, you and the original cast were the young ones, the rebels, somewhat like the Liars. Have you reflected on being sort of on the opposite side of that equation playing the parent trying to keep the peace?
KING: I don’t know if I necessarily reflected on it as like character-to-character, like playing a young character versus one of the parental characters, but definitely as just an actor in this business, and realizing that these actors that played the Liars, for a lot of us cast members on The Vampire Diaries, they were our age. So it definitely, I had that full circle moment. We were such babies, but also we were adults and young adults. It was just really exciting creatively. It was very invigorating. To feed off of their excitement of being there as well, and they were just fantastic, I feel like that’s probably the biggest full circle. Just remembering how young we were when we started The Vampire Diaries.
DEADLINE: You’ve been working with Julie for quite a long time. How has your working relationship with her evolved over time?
KING: I just feel just really grateful. The Vampire Diaries was my first job. It was my first real, big job. I worked on a few things before that. So it will just always feel like this sense of home, and I look back on it, and I feel really happy with that experience. So to still have the opportunity to work with Julie, even today, just be able to be lucky enough to hear her and the other writers — that I’ve also known for a really long time, not even just Carina, but Brett Matthews as well — talk about the day and talk about the scenes, it’s just my favorite thing in the whole world. I also am just such an uber fan of Julie directing. I think she is fantastic. I was so thrilled to not only see her work on the pages and be able to feel her work in the words that I was saying, but to see her behind the camera directing is one of my favorite things. I feel very honored that I was a part of her directorial debut on The Vampire Diaries, and here we are all these years later, and it just makes me very happy when she’s behind the camera as well.
DEADLINE: In We Were Liars the show, Bess alludes to something that happened the summer she was 16. Readers of the prequel will know that she kills someone. If we do get a Season 2, are you interested in exploring more of Bess and her past?
KING: I would love to come back for a Season 2, because I’ve also read Family of Liars. As the sisters, we all read and went through the story points of that book as well, because there’s so much backstory for our characters. The source material is right there for the backstory. There wasn’t anything to create. We get to really read all about their teenage years and what their life was like on the island, and I think it would just be so much fun. I mean, personally, I also am such a sucker for — give me a show that has a storyline with the ’90s and the music and the fashion and an organic reason to not have everyone be on a cell phone. Sign me up. I think it’s something that I would love to watch, as well as I think it’d be really fun to bring the Sinclairs back to the TV and see how they got themselves in this mess all these years later.
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The post ‘We Were Liars’: Candice King Unpacks The Inevitable “Regression” Of The Sinclair Sisters In Prime Video Series appeared first on Deadline.
