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.
Gat is played by newcomer actor Shubham Maheshwari, who told us he found the role through an open casting call on Backstage and got the part “many, many auditions later.” In the novel, Gat becomes the object of Cadence’s affections the summer when she has her incident, they reunite and a switch is flipped from a friendship to a romantic attraction between them.
While the novel is told solely from the perspective of Cadence, the series gets into all the perspectives of the surrounding characters, including Gat (especially in episode six). E. Lockhart’s writing style in We Were Liars makes Cadence an unreliable narrator and doesn’t allow for well-rounded POVs for the people around her. So, I’m with her that it’s great that she called on a number of writers to not only build upon this, but offer more depth to Gat.
While there have been more 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.
It’s one thing to write in Indian characters, but to invite people who can relate to the characters’ experiences is a solid way to build upon the representation of the title. Check out the series for yourself once it hits Amazon on Wednesday, June 18.
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