Grace Van Patten’s Nice Life

Grace Van Patten comes to this place for magic: the Big 5 Sporting Goods in Studio City. With its uninviting, gas-station-white exterior, it looks like the kind of place HAIM might stroll past in a music video without a second thought. But inside, it’s home to some of the actor’s favorite Los Angeles memories.

Like the time she purchased a pair of Heelys in a stroke of childlike whimsy. “I had my birthday party at the house and by the end of the night, everyone was taking turns putting on Heelys and dancing in the middle of a circle,” she says as we stroll the aisles one afternoon a few days before Christmas. Or the time she bought baseball pants in an ill-fated attempt at starting a new trend: “I thought that I could bring them back. Not that they were ever… there.”

At the counter, the 29-year-old star of Hulu’s Tell Me Lies spots a massive tub of Big League Chew, the shredded bubble gum brand she’d snack on during her childhood basketball games, and holds it up reverently. “Being here feels like the beginning of the school year and you’re getting all the apparel for the sports teams you’ve joined,” she says as the cashier rings up a bounty that includes Tiger Balm and Boost Oxygen canisters. “It gives me butterflies!”

Dressed in a look we’ll call Heated Rivalry chic — an Adidas x Gosha Rubchinskiy track jacket, baggy gray jeans, and a pair of wrap-around Ed Hardy sunglasses she thrifted in Toronto — Van Patten tells me acting and athletics aren’t so different. “Being on a set is a team sport. Everyone needs to be on their game to make a good product, and everyone needs each other. I think people forget that,” she says. “It’s supposed to be this collaborative team, but in a lot of situations it becomes an every-man-for-himself type of thing. So when other actors want to rehearse or think about the story in addition to just their arc, that’s when the best work gets made.”

A Tribeca native, Van Patten found her calling at New York City’s prestigious LaGuardia performing arts high school — where she counted Timothée Chalamet, Lourdes Leon, and Ansel Elgort as classmates — after discovering it had a basketball team. (“Timmy is a good friend of mine. I was in the audience for all of his rap performances, which were incredible,” she says. “I feel like such a proud mom for every person from LaGuardia that’s doing well. It gets me so pumped up.”) For a bunch of artsy kids, she swears, the team was actually pretty good. “It was a great escape from just acting for the rest of the day,” the former shooting guard says. “It was the only part that made me feel like I was at a normal high school.”

Normal days are rarer now for Van Patten. By the time we stop for lunch, it hasn’t even been 24 hours since the trailer for Tell Me Lies’ third season dropped, yet every teenage girl at Joan’s on Third already seems to have already watched it based on how many approach our table. Posing for sweaty selfies between bites of curry chicken salad has been par for the course ever since Tell Me Lies premiered in 2022 and cemented Van Patten as television’s best wearer of low-rise jeans since Mischa Barton.

“Grace is not trying to be a celebrity. I don’t think she’s dying to do Subway Takes. She’s not doing Get Ready With Me’s. She doesn’t lay it all out.”

An adaptation of Carola Lovering’s novel of the same name, the show follows the tortured relationship between college classmates Lucy (Van Patten) and Stephen (Jackson White) across eight years of mutually assured destruction. (Van Patten and White also date in real life.) The show was an immediate hit, but enthusiasm for it has reached a fever pitch ahead of this season (premiering Jan. 13), likely thanks to TikTok, where the show’s veneer of a CW-esque young adult drama — supercharged with HBO-level, firmly adult sex scenes — has hooked BookTokers and the platform’s most ardent smut-lovers alike. To date, the Season 3 trailer has racked up more than 19 million views on TikTok alone.

Though endlessly gracious, Van Patten isn’t entirely comfortable with all the newfound attention. Our interview is her first in-person one for a major outlet, and when I turn my recorder on, she tenses. “The slim chance of being famous has almost pushed me to stop [acting],” Van Patten admits. “It terrifies me to be under the spotlight like that. It’s probably my own insecurities and fear of people knowing too much about me. My main focus is just to act.”

According to Karah Preiss, who co-produces Tell Me Lies with Emma Roberts under their Belletrist Productions banner, it’s this exact quality that made her the perfect fit. “Originally there had been a discussion of Emma playing Lucy, but what works so well about Grace playing the lead is that Grace is anonymous. This was the role she was born to play, but it’s also just a role that she's great at playing because Grace can kind of do anything,” Preiss says. “I think what’s confusing is that Grace looks like a movie star … People look at her and they’re like, ‘Why isn't she as famous as Sydney Sweeney?’ The reality is she’s not trying to be a celebrity. I don’t think she’s dying to do Subway Takes; she’s not doing Get Ready With Me’s. She doesn’t lay it all out.”

Walking down Ventura with Van Patten, there’s no sign of Lucy’s dead-eyed menace or the dissociative pout the actor so effortlessly commands in photo shoots like the one accompanying this story. Instead, her nose-wrinkling smile radiates such a genuine steadiness that I find myself joking that she’s probably never had to take SSRIs before. (She hasn’t.) Later, I ask if she’s ever felt really down bad in a relationship, like Lucy, and she laughs: “No! But it’s not too late!”

So what’s her secret to being so well-adjusted? At this, Van Patten delivers the perfect PSA for every “are you mad at me” girlie out there. “When I’m sitting there feeling really anxious and really bad for myself, [I remember] that no one else is thinking of me,” Van Patten says earnestly. “Not in a bad way, but it’s not personal. There’s this attention and indulgence you’re giving to yourself.”

“Our approach to our relationship is we’re not going to flaunt anything and we’re not going to hide anything.”

If her life sounds pretty peachy, well, she won’t argue with that. “I’m not going to defend that, ever. I have been so unbelievably lucky with a lot of things,” she says. Among those many gifts is a family steeped in showbiz. Her father is television director Tim Van Patten, who’s worked on shows like Touched by an Angel, The Sopranos, and Boardwalk Empire. (Van Patten made her on-screen debut in an episode of The Sopranos at age 8.) Her younger sister Anna Van Patten is also an actor — the two even played sisters last year in Hulu’s true-crime drama The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, which starred the elder Van Patten as the American college student wrongfully imprisoned for murder in Italy in 2007 (a performance The Guardian called “unreservedly brilliant”).

“Just knowing that I have their love and support makes me have a lot less fear of being rejected by jobs, by people, by whatever,” she says. “That just gives me a lot of confidence.”

Being so close to the entertainment industry at a young age also gave her useful perspective. “The actors my dad had around that became really close to our family — like Edie Falco and James Gandolfini — these people who were very mega-famous, their number one priority was life and family first,” she says. “So I do think being exposed to those types of people and artists made me want that. I saw all these people who were only in it for the art and not anything else.”

And then there’s White, who’s been with her for the entire Tell Me Lies ride. The two began dating during the audition process, before the show even premiered. “We’ve had the same schedule for the past four years. When we’re working, it’s lined up. When we’re not working, it’s lined up,” she says. “It’s been really nice to go through that with someone, having the same anxieties and talking each other through it. We both handle it in different ways, but it’s the same anxiety.”

Raised in a similar milieu — White’s mother is Married... with Children actor Katey Sagal, who has cameoed on Tell Me Lies as his on-screen mom; his grandfather was also a television director — the two also share a similar stance on public life. “Our approach to [our relationship] is we’re not going to flaunt anything and we’re not going to hide anything. We’re going to live our lives the way we would if we weren’t on a show together because the second you start making those adjustments and accepting it, that’s when I’d start to feel really strange about life,” Van Patten says.

“The slim chance of being famous almost pushed me to stop acting.”

“I’d so much rather be who I am and live my life how I live it and not adapt because now this part of me is under the microscope,” she adds. “It’s easy because even if we were never on the show together, I wouldn’t be posting a million posts about my boyfriend.” The algorithm hasn’t forced us to learn about them, nor are they feeding it. Even their Instagram “hard launch” was in service to their careers: “If we kiss can we get a s2 @hulu,” White captioned a photo of the pair touching tongues.

Their off-screen romance is a sharp contrast to the toxic dynamic their characters play out on screen. Over the first seasons of Tell Me Lies, the pair have committed all kinds of betrayals: Lucy sleeps with his best friend; Stephen basically dumps her in the middle of a Hawaiian-themed frat party. Van Patten and White have talked a lot in their downtime about what keeps drawing them back together.

“In Lucy’s mind, there’s this weird connection they have where they can be their worst selves with each other and they don’t judge each other, which is so f*cked up, but they cannot surprise each other,” Van Patten says, offering her armchair diagnosis. “They know what both are capable of, and when they choose to be together, they’re choosing to accept all parts of each other. No one else will accept them.”

When we reunite with the characters in Season 3, they’re back together and have vowed to “be nice to each other this time.” But don’t expect it to last: Showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer has promised off-the-charts “depressed pervert” energy as a recording of Lucy — in which she confesses more secrets and betrayals — threatens to unravel her relationship and blow up her life.

“Meaghan would describe [filming the tape] as a hostage scene and it really feels like that. Watching it, you realize how much power [Stephen] really has over her in that moment,” Van Patten says. Roberts has said she wanted to make the show because, at that point in her life, she hadn’t been in a relationship that “wasn’t a thriller.” This season, it stops being a metaphor.

“Up until this point, it’s been all mind games,” Van Patten continues. “But from the tape on, there is something tangible that he could literally ruin her life with. It spins the whole show into this very active panic that’s different from every other season.”

It’s a big creative swing — but with Van Patten as team captain, Preiss never worries. “There’s a saying that whenever No. 1 on the call sheet is a pro, it brings up the rest of the show. She’s just a person who’s not looking to be, for lack of a better word, a dick on set,” Preiss says. “She shows up on time, knows her lines, and is a person that when she has to cry in a scene she cries in the first take. I think her aptitude for the craft itself makes everybody want to be a better actor.”

“When I’m sitting there feeling really anxious and bad for myself, I remember no one else is thinking of me.”

When I relay this compliment to Van Patten later, she is touched — but also finds it a little funny. “It always surprises me because inside my head it’s moving a mile a minute, so I must have a good poker face or something,” she says. Staying steely under pressure is, of course, the hallmark of an athlete. Van Patten also credits her dad: “I’ve seen my dad on set recently with a million extras, the most chaotic day you could ever imagine, and he was so cool, calm, and collected,” she recalls. “Then when he got home, he was like, ‘That was crazy.’ But he held it together for the people around him.”

She searches for a deeper answer. “It’s so important to have that quality as a director because people really look at you like a host,” she says. “I just have to be a good host so people feel safe and comfortable.” Then she pauses, before settling for something simpler: “It’s just being nice. I think it’s really easy to be nice.”

Top image credit: Gucci clothing and belt, Roberto Cavalli vintage bra from The Archive X Yana, Laura Lombardi earrings