The latest upcoming book-to-screen adaptation is the We Were Liars TV show, and as a fan of the original novel by E. Lockhart, I had my reservations about changes they could make to the source material for the series. But after watching it early, I was pleasantly surprised by how it expanded the plotline of the original novel. So when CinemaBlend had a chance to speak to Lockhart, I asked the author about her perspective on what was added to the book’s storyline for the new streaming series.
The 2014 bestseller follows Cadence Sinclair, a teen girl, who has spent all her summers on her family’s private island by Martha’s Vineyard. But when she has an incident one summer that leaves her washed up on the beach with a serious head injury and some missing memories, she returns to get answers from her group of playmates who didn’t check on her all year. Here’s what E. Lockhart told me regarding her favorite addition made for the TV series:
In our writer’s room we had a whole wide range of writers of different ages and levels of experience that included four writers of Indian descent. And those writers were able to contribute not only their lived experience, but also all of their storytelling skills and their comedy chops and their thriller acumen and everything. But, they were generous with their lived experience.
In the We Were Liars novel, Cadence has a group of friends she hangs out with over the summer. It consists of her two cousins, Mirren and Johnny, and the nephew of her aunt’s partner, Ed Patil, Gat. Both Ed and Gat are explicitly of Indian descent in the novel, but as Lockhart told us, for the TV series, she got to work with four writers who could relate to them from a cultural perspective and then add that into the storyline of those characters.
great South Asian characters pop up in recent movies and television, it’s amazing to see We Were Liars build on this with the TV show. The actor behind Gat’s uncle Ed is Rahul Kohli, who is well-known for being in many of Mike Flanagan’s movies and TV shows. E. Lockhart also said this about these two characters getting more of a storyline in our interview:
And so, the characters of Gat and Ed are fleshed out and nuanced and more authentic than I could have ever written by myself in the novel. So I’m really excited for people to see that.
Wednesday, June 18.