Tell Me Lies is a twisted take on a modern love story. The Hulu series, based on Carola Lovering’s bestselling book of the same name, is the buzziest new show of the fall. Sonia Mena, who uses they/she/he pronouns, stars as Pippa, a friend of Lucy’s at Baird University. While Lucy and Stephen’s relationship is a major focal point, the show will continue to dive into the lives of the other characters in their world.
“You’ll see a lot of just her journey of trying to find herself. Everybody in this show is hiding a lot,” Sonia told HollywoodLife about Pippa. “I’ll just say that you see a very top surface of her in the beginning. As it goes, you really start to go into the depths. She’s faced with a lot of situations where she’s got to figure out who she is and where she stands and who she’s going to fight for. I think it’s fun to watch the choices she makes.”
Sonia noted that Pippa and Lucy are the “classic best friend frenemy friendship that you have, especially when you’re that age, where they’re very similar, but they’re not necessarily great at communicating. They’re both people who are kind of repressed a little bit, so you have these great moments of real friendship and loyalty and just like fun insanity at parties, and then you have all of these moments of accidentally stepping on each other and accidentally stabbing each other.”
And then when Stephen comes into Lucy’s life, that just makes everything more complicated… for everyone. “We really butt heads a lot,” Sonia revealed about the dynamic between Pippa and Stephen. “Pippa is sort of the constant voice that nobody listens to. That’s like, stay away.”
Pippa has a romance of her own with hotshot athlete Wrigley. Their relationship is “really different” from Stephen and Lucy’s in the series. “I think Stephen and Lucy are quite internal, and it seems like a lot of angst, in addition to other things, fuels that relationship,” they said. “Wrigley is like the big man on campus, and Pippa is hell-bent on being the queen of parties. I think that their energy is much more extroverted. There’s a lot that happens between them where there’s still a lot of drama and angst, but they’re just very different.”
The actor stressed that there are “definitely real feelings” between Pippa and Wrigley. “He’s such a lovable character, and he’s so sweet,” Sonia continued. “I love the way that Spencer [House] went about that character. He’s so earnestly smitten by Pippa. You have kind of this tension between two people who are trying to just be extroverted, but then there’s a budding intimacy that I don’t think either of them is really quite ready to deal with underneath that.”
Over the course of the season, all of the characters will do “some pretty questionable things,” according to Sonia. Tell Me Lies won’t put all of the decisions in strict boxes. “I think what’s so good about it is like for Pippa, there’s a lot of things that happen with Pippa and Stephen that only Pippa and Stephen know about. You’re watching some people just skate through these scenarios, and you as the audience know and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, but nobody else does.’ In some ways, maybe it gives you a little bit more insight into how people can get away with these things,” the actor told Hollywoodife.
When Sonia read the breakdown for the character of Pippa, they “recognized a lot of myself in her. That was so exciting because I don’t often see that. I think also for like 2007 I remember watching TV and looking at magazines and never seeing or very rarely ever seeing anybody that looks like me, or that had aspects of their personality that I felt reflected myself. It’s very exciting to have the idea of like, it’s almost going back in time and putting your stamp on it in a way. That was very cool to me.” New episodes of Tell Me Lies drop Wednesdays on Hulu.