Warning: This post contains spoilers for Tell Me Lies season 3.
NEED TO KNOW
Lucy has a new love interest in Tell Me Lies season 3, but things are just as complicated as ever for her.
Costa D’Angelo joins season 3 as Alex, who is revealed to be one of Bree’s (Cat Missal) former foster siblings and is now pursuing a master’s degree at Baird and selling drugs on the side. He and Lucy (Grace Van Patten) share an unlikely attraction that evolves into yet another toxic dynamic for her.
“There’s something really dark about it,” Van Patten, 29, tells PEOPLE of Lucy’s new romantic interest. “Really dark and really tragic, and shows how low Lucy really is mentally.”
Instead of her expressing her negative mental state “to her friendships or [in] her everyday life,” she’s processing it in the bedroom with Alex, “which makes it even more secretive and subconscious.”
“She’s so far away from dealing with it in reality,” Van Patten says.
Disney/Ian Watson
Lucy asks Alex to degrade her during sex, which he goes along with, and from Van Patten’s perspective, that’s her character trying to “disguise it as whatever it is — as a sexual thing — when it really is so deep in her core.”
The intimate scenes with D’Angelo, she says, were “really difficult, difficult scenes” to shoot.
D’Angelo, 25, tells PEOPLE that he and Van Patten “got along so easily” after meeting for a chemistry read, which made the scenes easier to get through.
“Those scenes were so intense, but you trust each other,” he says. “I felt so comfortable in those moments, which is kind of crazy, because it’s my first time being so vulnerable on-screen and doing anything like that. But I truly felt really comfortable with the team and Grace and everybody.”
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Disney/Ian Watson
While Alex and Lucy’s relationship begins as them both “processing their grief and all this trauma together through sex,” it eventually transforms into something darker, D’Angelo warns.
“It’s healthy at first, but as it goes on and Alex opens up to her a bit, and maybe he starts to open his heart up, and he starts to fall for her, maybe — that’s scary for him,” he says. “And then he becomes the thing that he hates most and he’s afraid of.”
New episodes of Tell Me Lies drop Tuesdays on Hulu.
