We Were Liars: Meet the cast and the characters they play
In the mood for a summer mystery? We Were Liars, the new Prime Video series based on the novel by E. Lockhart, takes us to Beachwood–the private island owned by the Sinclair family–and the mystery of what happened at the end of Summer 16. The main characters are three cousins and one non-relation who call themselves "the liars" and have spent summers together since they were eight years old, a.k.a. Summer 8, playing and getting into trouble.
The liars grow up together until one summer changes everything for them and their family members. Like any show about a big family, it does take a minute to tell cousins from siblings and learn which child belongs to which parent. Here's what you need to know about the cast and crew of We Were Liars.
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2 hours ago
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We Were Liars EPs Talk Book-to-Show Changes, Including Which Sinclair Family Member Didn't Make the Cut
Summer has officially begun on Prime Video with the premiere of We Were Liars, a series adaptation of E. Lockhart's best-selling tale of romance, revenge and Ralph Lauren. Just like its 2014 source material, We Were Liars tells the story of Cadence Sinclair (played by Gossip Girl's Emily Alyn Lind), a 17-year-old trust fund princess haunted by the fractured memories of a tragedy no one in her uber-wealthy family wants to discuss. Over the course of one fateful summer on Beechwood, the Sinclairs' private island just off of Martha's Vineyard, the horrifying truth about what happened to Cadence — along with a slew of other family secrets — is finally brought to light. More from TVLine Eric Dane: My Countdown Task Force Leader Is 'Unapologetic, Determined' - and Wears the Hell Out of a Suit Does Jensen Ackles' Countdown Hero Have BDE - Big Dean (Winchester) Energy? 'There Are Familiar Aspects,' Says Supernatural Vet For First Time, Streaming Viewing Topped Broadcast and Cable Combined in May But while the basic premise remains fully intact, 'there were a lot of difficult changes made' in bringing the book to life, showrunner Carina Adly Mackenzie tells TVLine. 'Every time we made a change, I was clinging to the original kicking and screaming, sometimes to my own detriment, because I really didn't want to f–k this up.' Fellow showrunner Julie Plec considers the eight-episode finished product to be a 'very faithful adaptation' of the 2014 novel, except for one key distinction: 'It also involves a lot of elements that we borrowed from the prequel, Family of Liars, that we now get to take into future seasons because we've done all the foundational work with the adult characters.' Released in 2022, Family of Liars turns back the clock even further via flashbacks to Beechwood in the late 1980s, as the Sinclair sisters — Carrie, Penny and Bess, played on screen by Mamie Gummer, Caitlin Fitzgerald and Candice King — rattle yet another skeleton in their family's walk-in closet of tragedies. A third installment in the book series, We Fell Apart, is due out in November. Having already adapted several books for TV, most famously The Vampire Diaries, Plec isn't too concerned about fans getting upset about major changes. 'The things that are gone are very much up for debate, and I think the audience will have a good time debating why they're not there,' she says. 'And then there are things in the show that are not in the book, and I think the readers will have a good time debating why they're there too.' One relatively significant change readers will probably notice is the absence of Mirren's youngest sibling Taft, who was dropped in an effort to service the central characters; on the show, Bess' brood consists solely of Mirren and the twins. 'We would like to apologize to Taft Sinclair Sheffield,' Mackenzie tells TVLine, while Plec isn't quite as remorseful, explaining that 'Taft hit the cutting room floor before there was any footage to cut.' How much of We Were Liars have you already binged? Have you noticed any significant book-to-screen changes yet? If so, did they bother you? Grade the Prime Video adaptation in our poll below, then drop a comment with more of your thoughts. Best of TVLine Yellowjackets' Tawny Cypress Talks Episode 4's Tai/Van Reunion: 'We're All Worried About Taissa' Vampire Diaries Turns 10: How Real-Life Plot Twists Shaped Everything From the Love Triangle to the Final Death Vampire Diaries' Biggest Twists Revisited (and Explained)
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3 hours ago
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‘We Were Liars' Season 1 Ending Explained
Those who read E. Lockhart's sensational novel We Were Liars before it was adapted by Julie Plec for Prime Video are probably feeling pretty smug right now. The show, just like its source material, is keeping a major secret that isn't revealed until mid-way through the final episode. If you haven't read the book and are feeling majorly WTF, or want to skip to the proverbial last page and get spoiled, here's what you need to know about the ending of We Were Liars. At the beginning of the season, seventeen year old Cadence Sinclair, played by Emily Alyn Lind, returns to her family's private island after sustaining a head injury and post-traumatic amnesia the previous year. Cadence has been struggling to remember what happened during Summer 16–the label that "the liars" she and her cousin Mirren, her cousin Johnny, and her boyfriend (and Johnny's future stepbrother) Gat give to the summer when they were all sixteen years old. She thinks that returning to the island will jog her memory, but everything feels off. Why did her grandfather rebuild their island mansion into an early modern monstrosity? Why didn't her cousins or Gat call her all year while she was recovering? Her mother tells her that every time anyone tells her what happened, she has a mental episode, blacks out and forgets again. This feels a bit convenient, given that the Sinclair family way is to pretend that bad things never happened. In the We Were Liars finale, Cadence works with her cousins and Gat to remember what happened without triggering herself so bad that she forgets it all over again. Leading into the finale, Cadence remembers one key thing: fire. In the penultimate episode, Cadence at least remembers that the liars burned down Clairmont, the family mansion, as a symbolic "fuck you" to decades of family rivalry and expectations. They decide that the Sinclairs need a clean slate. The four liars thought they had a good plan. They split up spreading boat fuel around the house. Gat prepares a getaway vehicle. They were all supposed to light their matches and run out of the house at the stroke of midnight. But the drunk, wealthy teenagers made some crucial, and deadly miscalculations. The first thing that Cadence remembers is that all four of them forgot that there were two drugged-up dogs sleeping in the basement!! The moment Cadence, who was on the ground floor, ran outside she heard their cries. She heads back inside to get them, and sustained a head injury, but it was too late. She ran back outside, bleeding and burning. Cadence demands that Johnny, Gat, and Mirren tell her the rest. What else didn't go to plan? They didn't think about how fast fire spreads and smoke rises. Creating a safe exit by avoiding the main staircase was not enough. Mirren hesitated to save one of her paintings that her mom kept–proving to her in that moment that her mom really did care about her. Johnny hesitated looking at childhood photos and smashing things with a golf club. They were trapped. When nobody showed up, Gat left the boat and followed them inside the burning house. They also forgot about the gas main line. Once the fire spread far enough to hit it, the house exploded. This is what catapulted Cadence into the ocean where she was found. She was the only survivor. Gat, Johnny, Mirren, and the dogs all died in the fire. Yup! For all of the Summer 17 timeline, a.k.a. the scenes where Cadence has brown hair, she has been talking and hanging out and arguing with their ghosts. You may have noticed throughout that while they might try to talk to the rest of them family, nobody else talks to them or sees them. In the final episode, it becomes more and more apparent that they're not just ghosts they like... represent Cadence's trauma and suppressed memories. They are ghosts, though, and ghosts who were afraid of moving on once Cadence didn't need them anymore. So they do it together. They hold hands, jump off the dock, and vanish... One of the final things that Cadence remembers about Summer 16 is that, before she ran out of the house, she hesitated too. Greed took over and she ran upstairs to steal her grandmother's black pearl necklace. She thinks this is why Gat didn't see her outside when they planned and ran into the fire. She blames herself for his death. Ghost Gat absolves her of that guilt. He could have saved himself. He also went against the plan. (Since Cadence ran back inside the house seconds later for the dogs, I personally don't think running upstairs made a huge difference. Gat would have seen her go back inside. He would have seen that Johnny and Mirren didn't make it out and gone to help regardless. Speaking of the dogs, that's the guilt she should be feeling. The four liars made some stupid mistakes that got them killed–the dogs didn't do anything! Go apologize to their ghosts!!) Harris, who somehow escaped the hospital and found Cadence on the beach, kind of softly blackmails his granddaughter. He knows that she's guilty of arson, animal cruelty, and involuntary manslaughter. He urges her to tell the version of the story he has been telling for a year: the fire was an accident and Cadence got hurt trying to save the others. Keeping her family's horrible secrets is her burden now. At the end of the show, Harris asks Cadence to talk to a reporter doing a profile on their family, played by We Were Liars author E. Lockhart herself. Cadence refuses, telling Harris and the family that she's not interested in fairy tales anymore, and takes off in a boat by herself. She tosses Tipper's necklace into the ocean like it's Titanic. This is a triumphant moment and all; I'm so happy that Cadence came to that realization, but... surely that doesn't mean she's going to turn herself in to the police, or come clean to her mom, Ed, and her aunts about how the other liars died? It's fair to assume that Harris won't actually do it himself and voluntarily hurt his legacy like that. But Cadence is experiencing a moment of freedom at the end of We Were Liars, not a lifetime of it. She's ultimately trapped too. The We Were Liars finale leaves things open for at least one other season in two different ways. In one of the rare moments we see the Sinclair sisters actually deal with the loss of their children, Bess tells Carrie that she thinks the fire was punishment for what happened on her Summer 16 when they were teenagers. Bess says that there's just one caveat: if the Sinclair sisters are being punished for what they did, why was Penny spared? Mysterious! (There is a prequel novel, titled Family of Liars, that was published in 2022...) Then, in an even more harrowing moment, we see Carrie secretly take pills while packing up to leave the island. She's off the wagon and hiding it from Ed. She can also see Johnny's ghost, who tells her he can't leave just yet. The way she says "I thought you'd left" lowkey implies that she's been seeing his ghost, like Cadence, the whole time during Summer 17 too. That's enough unfinished business for a We Were Liars Season 2, don't you think?
Elle
4 hours ago
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6 Reasons It's Actually Fun Watching 'We Were Liars' And Knowing That Huge Twist
Spoilers below for the final episode and twist of 'We Were Liars'. It's a rollercoaster if you've adored a book and hear it's getting made into a TV show. There's the initial excitement. Who will play your favourite character? Will the world look like the one you've built in your mind? Everyone else is going to discover how amazing it is. And many fans of E. Lockhart's book, We Were Liars will have been excited by the release of Prime Video's adaptation, which began streaming this week. But there are drawbacks too - there's room for disappointment of course, but there's also the fact that you know how it ends. While loads of people find huge joy and comfort in repeat watches, maybe I'm just too plot driven because for me, already knowing how the story plays out isn't a draw, and in fact, it's a turn off. And in the case of a story like We Were Liars the risk of being turned off by this knowledge is even greater, because the whole story hinges on a huge twist - that while Candence Sinclair is trying to puzzle through what happened to her last summer, her friends, The Liars, are actually now ghosts, having died in the fire that also caused her injury. Author E. Lockhart is part of the writing team who created the show and says she has high hopes people will still love the show's ending. 'During the pandemic, people started making TikTok videos about the novel, holding the book with tears running down their face,' she said. 'This show is going to do that, turned up to 11.' But it's not just fans of the book who may have discovered the ending - the internet is a terrible spoilery place and some of us are just too tempted to wait for eight hours of television to play out. No mattter how you came to know what happens at the end of We Were Liars, I'm here to reassure you that you can still enjoy the eight-episode show. Here's why. Throughout Summer 17, The Liars get to be with Cadence all summer and somehow avoid a million moments where people say 'Er, Cadence, who are you talking to?' Knowing throughout the series that The Liars are ghosts in Summer 17 you get to really enjoy the subtle ways it's written into the plot. For instance, in the moment when Johnny's mother Carrie finds Cadence with his phone and she ignores his pleas to give the phone back. Or when Mirren's little sister laughs when Cadence suggests Mirren tell her a ghost story. Yes the moments are played back 'realisation style' at the end, but it's quietly satisfying watching them play out without Cadence realising what's going on. Well, obviously. But there are many moments when those who don't know the big plot twist will be shouting at their TVs 'But why won't you just tell her what happened?' and 'Why are you all going along with this?' The cover, that Cadence must learn for herself because otherwise she gets headaches and blacks out, starts to wear frustratingly thin six episodes in. Watching while understanding what's going on is a much less stressful experience. Sometimes you just need a little bittersweet in your life. True fans of the book fell for the great bond between The Liars and especially, Cadence and Gat. Watching their interactions before and after the fire knowing what's really going on adds a bittersweet layer to watching the story play out that you might've skimmed over in the book in your rush to find out what on earth was going on. As Cadence notes in the final episode - without fully understanding - in Summer 17 the Sinclair sisters - for my money, the best bit of the show, and one expanded out from the book - aren't fighting anymore. The levels to which the sisters will go to hurt each other when a verbal fight breaks out is unmatched. And to see the change - and truly understand it, makes a real difference to the depth of the show, and the clever plotting. Compared to some shows, the changes between the book and the TV series when it comes to We Were Liars are small and delicately done, but they are there. Particularly when it comes to the deeper exploration of Gat's background and his misgivings about Harris Sinclair and the family's treatment of their staff on the island. When Cadence first meets Gat, she asks him, 'Are you real?' For those of us who know how the relationship between the two plays out, it's a great and touching moment. And when Ed says in episode seven that The Liars have their whole lives ahead of them? Pure heartbreak. ELLE Collective is a new community of fashion, beauty and culture lovers. For access to exclusive content, events, inspiring advice from our Editors and industry experts, as well the opportunity to meet designers, thought-leaders and stylists, become a member today HERE.
