When “Vampire Diaries” creator Julie Plec and “Roswell, New Mexico” showrunner Carina Adly MacKenzie first began the process of adapting E. Lockhart’s “We Were Liars,” they felt an immense pressure to stay true to the beloved YA novel — sometimes even more than the author, herself.
“Our North Star as a team was, ‘Do not screw up that beautiful book,’” Plec told TheWrap. “It evolved into a relationship where the novelist was more often telling us that it was OK to change things, while Carina was fighting tooth or nail to try to keep things.”
It was Adly MacKenzie, who worked alongside Plec as a writer and producer for “Vampire Diaries” spinoff series “The Originals,” who first brought “We Were Liars” to Plec as a vacation read recommendation when the book was published in 2014. “She put it, basically, in my hands and said, ‘You’re welcome.’”
Set on a breezy, fictional New England island (called Beechwood Island), “We Were Liars” centers on the old money Sinclair family, finding its protagonist in the eldest grandchild, Cadence, who is heir to the Sinclair fortune. Following Cadence, her cousins and their childhood friend (who’s also Cadence’s love interest), known as the “liars” — as well as their mothers, the three daughters of patriarch Harris Sinclair (David Morse) — the Prime Video series investigates the family’s generational trauma, which is pushed to the forefront in the wake of a traumatic head injury.
“It was a pretty easy thing to put at the top of a wish list, because my whole career, all I’ve ever wanted to do was make people feel big, huge feelings, and there aren’t a lot of books like this one where you feel all the feelings,” Plec said.
She was all-in after reading the book, and Plec and Adly MacKenzie began vying for the rights to adapt it, which Plec’s My So-Called Company and Universal Television eventually acquired, alongside “We Were Liars” prequel “Family of Liars” and novel “Again Again,” in 2022. “Over the years, we fought long and hard to get the ability to actually make it as a TV show and then finally, 11 years later, here we are,” Plec said.
“It’s not a story that necessarily … easily translates to screen,” Adly MacKenzie added, noting the book consists of “a lot of internal musings and then really, really, really long conversations between people,” which she said is “not how you write good TV.” “Part of the fun was the challenge; a lot of people have tried. We were excited to give it our shot.”
After obtaining the rights, the creators jumped into the writers’ room, where they were armed with the expertise of Lockhart, who was in the room with Plec and Adly MacKenzie for 10 weeks. Throughout the writing process, Plec recalled how Adly MacKenzie would “write these beautiful moments that were so true to the book,” though many ended up getting cut due to length, prompting Adly MacKenzie to fight for whichever fan-favorite line to be kept in the script.
“I would say, ‘OK, well, keep one and you can lose the other,” Plec said. “You can only fight that for so long.”
“I realized that some of the stuff from the book that had gotten lost along the way also made its way back in along the way,” Adly MacKenzie agreed, noting the pilot had initially taken a turn towards being much more “explicit and clear,” though the inclusion of a voiceover at the beginning ultimately made the premiere episode much more poetic and in-line with the book. “We found our medium, a happy medium.”
Like many shows that have premiered within the past year, “We Were Liars” was inevitably impacted by the WGA strike in 2023, which happened as the series was casting the liars, which were eventually found in Emily Alyn Lind, Esther McGregor, Joseph Zada and Shubham Maheshwari.
“We started casting for six months, and then the actors went on strike for five months and then we basically picked up and cast for another six months,” Plec said. “We did have the luxury of really taking our time … and seeing as many people as we could possibly see.”
Alyn Lind, who can be seen in “The Babysitter” movies and the “Gossip Girl” reboot, became their Cadence, while McGregor came on as Mirren, shifting what the writers had in mind for the character. “We had to almost choose Esther and then write Mirren, because all the different ways we were writing Mirren were not Esther, because Esther is just too cool,” Plec said. “We decided that we wanted her more than we wanted to keep the character we’d already put on the page.”
The duo also joked that they get the bragging rights for giving Zada, who will soon play young Haymitch Abernathy in the “Hunger Games” prequel movie “Sunrise on the Reaping,” his first big American role as Johnny. “That kid is going places, and we’re just along for the ride,” Plec said.
Maheshwari came on as Gat before the rest of the liars as part of an open casting call filmed in his dormroom. Though he had never acted before aside from a few student films — leading Adly MacKenzie to think “we can’t cast the lead of the show as someone who’s never even thought about acting before” — after bringing him in for a producer session and chemistry reads, Maheshwari became the only option for Gat.
The next generation of Sinclairs is found in Caitlin Fitzgerald as Penny, Mamie Gummer as Carrie and Candice King as Bess. King reunites with the creators after starring in “The Vampire Diaries” and “The Originals,” though they weren’t sure she would line up well for the role, as when they first brought up the part to her, she was a few years too young for it. “She was always our favorite, and the voice of Bess became so vividly Candice in our head … and it made Bess easier to write,” Adly MacKenzie shared.
Layered in the romance between Cadence and Gat, as well as the YA storylines for Mirren and Johnny, “We Were Liars” is a discussion of privilege, classism and racism as Gat and Cadence exchange Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste” and Cadence confronts her grandfather’s implicit biases. Adly MacKenzie noted how the series addresses these themes, but said it doesn’t necessarily “land on a pretty little lesson at the end,” admitting “these things are really complicated.”
“We are experiencing a moment where we need people in power, people who look like me, to not just sit comfortably by when they see wrongs happening because the wrongs aren’t happening to them or because they’ve got their own agenda to further,” Adly MacKenzie said. “Passing that fight on to the next generation is going to cost us all.”
For both Plec and Adly MacKenzie, “We Were Liars” marked a departure from sci-fi and supernatural elements found in their shows like “Vampire Diaries,” “The Originals” and “Roswell, New Mexico.” This presented a challenge to not rely on genre as a storytelling crutch.
“[With] the absence of that external, big, high-stakes conflict, you still want to write the scene that just sits there beautifully in its own space, but you get insecure about the fact that it might not have enough conflict, or it might not have enough dramatic pivots and twists and turns,” Plec said. “It’s kind of like teaching yourself how to write from the basics all over again.”
“We Were Liars” is now streaming on Prime Video.
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