Grace Van Patten was raised on the sets of Game of Thrones, Sex and the City, and The Sopranos. The now-27-year-old daughter of director Timothy Van Patten even guest starred on the latter when she was eight, playing Eugene Pontecorvo’s daughter. This rare behind-the-scenes access gave Van Patten a clear sense of the industry—and reasons to fear it.
“I saw how scary and unpredictable it was and how hard it is,” says Van Patten, who lives in Los Angeles. Two decades later, Van Patten, 27, has proven she has what it takes to make it in Hollywood, working alongside A-list actors, including Nicole Kidman and Adam Sandler, as well as starring in the hit show Tell Me Lies, a TV adaptation of Carola Lovering’s dark coming-of-age novel. The long-awaited second season of the Emma Roberts–produced series, which follows college students entangled in a toxic relationship, is finally streaming on Hulu.
Van Patten grew up in Tribeca with her father and mother, the model Wendy Rossmeyer, as well as two younger sisters. She was accepted into the prestigious performing art school Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where her classmates included Ansel Elgort and Timothée Chalamet. Every day, Van Patten spent four hours acting. The school was “really intense,” she says. “By the end of it, you either really want to do what you were studying, or you want to go as far away from it as possible.”
Van Patten fell into the first category. “I was definitely hooked at that point.” In 2014, she earned a spot in the University of Southern California’s theater program. Van Patten took a gap year, studying psychology and philosophy at her local community college while auditioning for TV shows and movies.
When she landed a lead part in the 2016 Netflix film Tramps, acting alongside Callum Turner, Van Patten deferred college again. “I’m still deferring,” she says, laughing. “It took me getting my first real job to [realize] I can do this.”
“I saw how scary and unpredictable [acting] was and how hard it is.”
Other roles quickly followed; Van Patten acted in The Meyerowitz Stories with Ben Stiller, co-starred with Kidman in Nine Perfect Strangers, and shared the stage with Zosia Mamet in the Off Broadway play The Whirligig. But no project drew Van Patten in as quickly as Tell Me Lies.
Van Patten connected to her character, Lucy Albright, immediately. “The show took these young people’s feelings so seriously,” she says. “I really don’t think you see that a lot.”
The first season premiered in the fall of 2022, introducing a rapidly growing fan base to Albright and Stephen DeMarco, played by Van Patten’s real-life boyfriend, Jackson White, as the college students fall into a hot, heavy, and increasingly dark relationship. The show jumps between Albright’s first year of college and the couple’s reunion, eight years later. “I think it’s really easy to glorify these kinds of toxic, sexy relationships,” Van Patten says. But “the show really doesn’t do that.”
Tell Me Lies skillfully balances parties, sex scenes, and college nostalgia with the reality that, unlike many Hollywood love stories, this is a couple that is not supposed to end up together. DeMarco lies, deceives, and manipulates Albright, who loses her sense of self. Yet she remains drawn in by their chemistry. “Any person at any age [with] any personality can get sucked into something like this,” says Van Patten. She notes that acting out these emotionally violent scenes feels much easier with White than it would another actor, given their loving off-screen relationship.
When I ask Van Patten who she would be most excited to learn watches Tell Me Lies, she replies without missing a beat: “If Steve-O watches Tell Me Lies, I don’t know what I would do.”
Tell Me Lies is available for streaming on Hulu
Clara Molot is a Senior Editor at AIR MAIL
