Emily Alyn Lind on Fire Deaths Twist, Season 2

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Season 1 of “We Were Liars,” now streaming on Prime Video.

When Emily Alyn Lind was first approached about starring in a TV adaptation of E. Lockhart’s popular 2014 YA novel “We Were Liars,” she admittedly had some doubts.

“I’m a little bit cynical, and I wasn’t expecting much — I didn’t know what to expect, really,” Lind tells Variety. “[But] when I read the pilot, I was like, ‘Whoa. This is juicy.’ What happens next?’” After reading the book in one sitting, and finding out what she calls the “gutsy” twist, she knew she had to be a part of it.

The surprise twist, which has been one of the book’s biggest talking points over the past decade, is that 17-year-old Cadence (Lind), the youngest member of the elite Sinclair family, is the only survivor of a fire that killed her cousins Johnny (Joseph Zada) and Mirren (Esther McGregor), and family friend (and her love interest), Gat (Shubham Maheshwari) — the close-knit group who’ve been dubbed “The Liars.”

So as the story flashes back and forth between one summer and the next, with Cadence trying to piece together what happened to her, the reason she can’t remember anything is because of the trauma of watching her friends die — meaning, the present-day version of the Liars have been ghosts all along, or figments of her imagination (think “The Sixth Sense” style). The twist is made all the more emotional because Cadence is the one who convinced her friends to burn the Sinclair house down in a symbolic act of defiance.

“We Were Liars” follows Lockhart’s book closely, beginning with Cadence waking up on a beach with amnesia, and struggling to piece together fragments of her memory on Beechwood island, off of Martha’s Vineyard. Over the course of eight episodes, Cadence is forced to come to terms with the lies told in her white American royal family, along with those the Liars tell to each other. Below, Lind dives into Cadence’s impulsive plan to set the Sinclair house on fire, building out her romantic chemistry with newcomer Maheshwari and why Cadence’s story isn’t quite finished with this season.

Part of the big twist is that Cadence is the one who had the idea to set the house on fire, getting all of the other Liars on board. Why was it important that this impulsive decision came from your character?

I had to ask myself that a lot, because it was really hard filming knowing the ending — that this was not going to end well. What’s so interesting about Cadence is that she’s quite a flawed character. In the end, she really is trying her best. She’s finally deciding she’s going to take a little more accountability for the things that she’s decidedly to be so blissfully unaware of for so long, and that’s primarily because of her boyfriend, Gat. Through his perspective, she’s able to see what life is like when you’re not a wealthy, 17-year-old blonde billionaire. Cadence is not flawed in the quirky flawed way or the silly flawed way, but she’s just a flawed human being who’s grown up in this bubble. Her idea of starting this fire and getting everyone on board is her attempt to say, “Listen, I realize now what our family stands for. I’m going to change this by doing something super impactful and I’m going to rid all of this bad juju, all of this bad energy, and I’m going to change my family.” They’re going to be better off. 

In a sense, that just feels like a bit of an immature idea, but it’s also very youthful and coming from her heart. But she is telling and not asking. She’s risking her friend’s lives, and not taking into account that, if this did mess up, who would be accountable for this. Would it be Gat? There was a lot of stuff going through my head when filming that.

That whole fire sequence is so intense. What was it like filming that on set?

We filmed that over two weeks, and it was an emotional two weeks. We had been shooting for so long, and Nova Scotia was not only just a very isolated place, but we were really around no one but the cast and the crew, so we got so close and everything felt so real all the time. During the finale, it was really the end, the goodbye. Usually when you’re doing a series, you expect with all these characters that Season 2 is going to be a breeze, because you’ve really built this chemistry, and fans will love it. While we were filming all of that, we knew the main characters weren’t going to live on. Literally. So it was kind of a goodbye to this thing we built.

Knowing how it ended, I just had to try to pretend that I didn’t because this had to be a hyper-manic episode with Cadence having a super drunk moment. She has to sort of enjoy this, and be very confident about starting these fires before we see everything has turned out for the worse. It was very emotional with a lot of stunts. There was a lot of a lot!

You mentioned the importance of Cadence’s connection with Gat, and especially the revelation that he went back into the house and died trying to save her. How did you build out your chemistry with Shubham Maheshwari, and how did that culminate in your characters saying goodbye?

I met Shubham on a Zoom chemistry read after I auditioned for the part. A year went by, then I met him on a Zoom with a bunch of other guys reading for the same thing. Four months went by, and then we did another chemistry read, and I could tell they really liked him. I didn’t learn until afterward that he had auditioned for this off of Backstage. He didn’t have reps, he was studying Econ in Canada, but he was from Dubai and he just submitted a tape. He was completely fresh, and this was so new for him. I was a little nervous at first, because I knew this was going to be a complicated character with a very important dynamic to get right.

What really helped was forming a relationship with Nzingha Stewart, our pilot director who served as executive producer on the show, because she really helped us find the vulnerability of first love. And then you throw in a traumatic event, and you imagine what happens. It gets messy quite fast, but if we didn’t have that structure in the beginning, we wouldn’t have this great loss in the end. So it was important to see those Summer 16 transitions when they were only a year younger, but so much more youthful and naive. In Summer 17, it feels like they’ve aged 20 years at that point. Seeing that turn into fear that she’s lost Gat, or that he hasn’t been loyal to her, was tragic. So in the end when Gat comes back to save her, you’re already in love with their relationship. You know that Gat would do anything for her — he’s been coming to this island that spits on him for all these years just for Cadence.

It’s so cool that he just auditioned through Backstage. You never would’ve guessed it was his first major role just from watching!

He picked up stuff so fast. There’s something really cool about working with new actors, because they have such an excitement and a work ethic that you don’t always see with seasoned actors. That is really refreshing, and makes you want to do better.

Something else that’s really important to the finale episode is the necklace that Cadence throws off at the end, and how symbolic that is. Your character is struggling to piece together her memories throughout the show, how important were these physical details and objects to build that out?

Cadence is an unreliable narrator, we’re seeing life through her eyes most of the time, and she’s seeing things that remind her of memories that she’s either ready for or not ready for. I really like that observation, because it was really important: Everything down from the notes in her drawer that Gat had written her to the dried roses that brings back the memory of Gat being unfaithful to her to the pearl necklace that brings back — it’s hard to say, because I haven’t said it yet! — the memory of her friends parishing inside the fire.

It helped me as an actor to analyze those things. The most emotional, tangible object is the letter that Gat writes to Cadence when he’s supposed to go off to school for his scholarship. He says to open it on her birthday. I could cry now, because it was one of the most emotional scenes for me. She puts it on her bookshelf and forgets about it and then, after she finds out the Liars are ghosts she’s mourning, she remembers where she sees the little note. She takes it out and it’s Gat’s necklace, and you think, “Oh, wow, Gat hasn’t been wearing this necklace in Summer 17.” That’s when we realize he hasn’t been wearing it anymore, because he’s a ghost. I get chills thinking about it, because it’s such a beautiful story, and all these things were thought out so thoroughly, making it really easy to jump into.

Another interesting thread throughout the series comes with Cadence trying to be a more outspoken person on social issues, and the pushback she gets from her family as she wrestles with what it means to be a Sinclair. Without Gat in her life anymore, I’m curious what you make of what’s next for Cadence after leaving the Sinclairs behind. Does her activism come from a genuine place?

With a lot of the things Cadence is doing — whether it’s burning her house down or speaking up to her grandfather — she believes these things because she knows the person she loves feels like an outsider. He’s not respected in any sense because of all the prejudice and racism from this family, and that’s who she loves. But there’s only so much that says about a person because, yes, she loves him, so she doesn’t want bad things to happen to him. But that doesn’t mean she’s a fully adapted person. It’s an interesting first step, for sure, but I do believe that, even in the way I played it, there is a very raw performative nature to it. That’s not fake, per se, but it’s not fully formed. She’s wanting to know, for a fact, that she is totally against her family and doesn’t want to be rich, she doesn’t want to be a Sinclair, she doesn’t care about the legacy. But there’s always going to be generational trauma that comes with being part of a family like that. Seeing the women in her life that have been taught to be silent, to look and dress a certain way and keep your feelings in, does take a toll.

When Cadence leaves the island, people have been saying that kind of wraps it up into a perfect bow. She’s wiped her hands clean. And I said no, not at all: Because for once, she’s made a decision — which is the least she can do — to mourn her friends and get the fuck out of that place. But it’s only the first step, right? What a lot of people don’t remember is that the last conversation she has with her grandfather is, “If you do not show up and you do not stick with the family right now, I will tell everyone what you’ve done.” In life, a lot of people will pack up and leave their families, but that doesn’t mean they don’t bring baggage with them and secrets. So we will see, maybe Season 2 will dive into that a little bit. I think the story hasn’t quite ended there.

This interview has been edited and condensed.