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It’s one thing to take on the role of Amanda Knox for a TV show. It’s another thing entirely to do it when the real person is on set, watching that happen.
For Grace Van Patten, it was critical that Knox was involved in Hulu’s The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, an all-new limited series that explores the now 38-year-old’s 16-year odyssey to set herself free after she was wrongly convicted in the 2007 murder of her roommate, Meredith Kercher.
“The main thing for me was what involvement Amanda was going to have in it,” Van Patten, 28, tells PEOPLE in the latest issue. “So when I found out she was going to be involved, I was really excited and also nervous. Because what would she think of me, this random actress portraying her in a very traumatic time of her life?”
The trust that Knox had in Van Patten right off the bat was shocking to her.
“When I met her, it was just so beautiful how vulnerable she was about it and how open she was,” the actress says. “And how willing she was to talk to me and trust me.”
Disney/Andrea Miconi
“It felt very beautiful and emotional because of how people have created this narrative of her whole life. So to meet with somebody like me and trust [me], I just thought was so inspiring and amazing.”
Knox is an executive producer on the series, so she was involved from the start in crafting the story, which follows her from her early days studying abroad as a 20-year-old college student in Perguia, through to 2022, seven years after she was acquitted by Italy’s highest courts.
Van Patten wasn’t sure how she’d feel having Knox on set, seeing her embody her story.
“I thought I was going to be more nervous, but it was a comfort,” she says. “But it’s only because she made it that way.”
“She was so trusting and was there if I needed anything or had any questions and really allowed me to tell her story,” the Tell Me Lies star recalls. “That felt so good, to feel trusted.”
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“I don’t know if I’ll ever experience something like that again,” she continues. “It just felt very, very important to me, which I haven’t experienced doing a job before. The importance of telling something that really should be told.”
She was so deeply in the throes of Knox’s life that even now, five months after filming wrapped, she’s still finding pieces of Knox in herself.
After six months in Rome and Budapest filming the limited series, Van Patten went right to Vancouver to start season 3 of Tell Me Lies. “I went right into it. I’m like, ‘Oh, I feel like I have Amanda-isms.'”
“It was a crazy transition for me,” she admits. “I’m totally having an identity crisis.”
It was a comfort that playing Lucy on the salacious Hulu drama is so familiar to her now, four years in.
“I was really nervous because, since I started Tell Me Lies, I’ve only done Tell Me Lies. But I’m so thankful that it is the third season of something, and it’s in my body — whether I feel it or not. Unfortunately, that character is in my body.”
Disney/Adrienn Szabó
While it might have been an abrupt change of pace, in retrospect, Van Patten says it was likely for the best after such a whirlwind in Knox’s shoes. “I think it did help kind of shed that intensity and move on.”
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The first two episodes of The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox are now streaming on Hulu.
