When Tell me lies debuted in fall 2022, no one was sure how it would be received. The Hulu series about a toxic relationship between two students at a fictional college was the first project to come out of Emma Roberts’ adaptation-focused first-look deal with the streamer and featured a cast of then-relatively unknown actors. But then star Grace Van Patten very quickly noticed something strange; as she walked around Los Angeles with Jackson White (who plays the other half of the aforementioned toxic relationship), girls would roll down their car windows or stop her on the sidewalk to yell at her to stay away from White, as if the series’ world was real.

“It felt like we were on a reality show,” says Van Patten. “It was cool that people thought so highly of these characters – but also a little scary, because he’s not like that in real life, I swear.”

Tell me lies may be Van Patten’s first film, but she’s no newbie. She grew up in New York City—her father is Emmy-winning director Timothy Van Patten—and attended LaGuardia, the city’s premier performing arts high school (her classmates included Timothée Chalamet and Ansel Elgort), where she realized that acting was the perfect outlet for the emotions and parts of herself she had previously been reluctant to show. She booked a few small television appearances (Law & Order: SVU, Boardwalk Empire) before making her breakthrough in 2017 with the role of Adam Sandler’s daughter in Noah Baumbach’s film The Meyerowitz Stories. She has also worked alongside heavyweights such as Emma Stone (Insane) and Nicole Kidman and Michael Shannon (Nine perfect strangers), which the newly formed cast of Lie in even stronger contrast.

Van Patten was too young to host an entire series on her own, but the show quickly became a hit, attracting the attention of legions of young fans who felt compelled to debate the merits of the rollercoaster ride of Lucy and Steven’s relationship on social media. Production on the show’s second season was set to begin last summer, and a delay caused by a SAG strike tested Van Patten’s anxiety even more. “I saw these other projects dropping like flies, so I felt like I was panicking,” she says. “It’s hard to be positive in moments like that.”

Now, finally, the second season premiered on September 4th – Patten’s Lucy has a new love interest (gossip Girl‘s Thomas Doherty), but the drama with Jackson remains, as does Lucy’s less-than-tolerable behavior. “When I look at her objectively, I feel sorry for her because even though she’s doing all these horrible and manipulative things, I think she’s doing it out of a need for validation,” Van Patten says. “We’ve all been there — it’s partly that age where you confuse passion and newness with love, and that can drive you crazy. I’ve seen all of my friends in that situation. Something in your brain gets loose and you don’t behave the way you normally would.”

Interested in Tell me lies 1st season reached a new peak when savvy viewers began to suspect that Van Patten and White had begun their own romance off-screen. The two deftly dodged interview questions about their on-screen chemistry and kept their cool when spotted in public — Van Patten mentions that early in their relationship, she dyed her signature blonde hair black to subconsciously shed the role after filming wrapped, but that it also provided some protection from detection — until they finally went public on their Instagram accounts.

“We didn’t think much about keeping it a secret because it felt right and people were nice about it,” she says. And now they’re embarking on season two and the accompanying press tour, with their relationship at the center of their audience’s intrigue. It’s a scenario that has plagued the stars of similar shows in the past (gossip Girlby Penn Badgley and Blake LivelyRiverdale(Lily Reinhart and Cole Sprouse) to put their private lives in the service of the common good of the series.

She admits she hasn’t thought about her strategy yet, but adds she has no reason to worry. “I know a lot of the press coverage of this show is very clickbait, but I’m not sensitive or paranoid about privacy,” she muses. “Our relationship is out there, but not too much. I think the best way is to just treat our relationship professionally, like we do in our own lives.”

For now, Van Patten is mostly concerned about whether the show’s material will connect with audiences in the same way it did two years ago — “The spice and everything that people loved about the first season feels very similar to me,” she notes — while also looking to the future. She recently moved to Los Angeles full-time and loves how walking around her canyon neighborhood feels like a “small town.”

And soon she’ll begin production on Hulu’s miniseries based on Amanda Knox’s life. In the role of the convicted and then acquitted Knox, Van Patten is taking on a character for the first time that she says she doesn’t easily identify with. “I’m still finding myself, but acting is a great way to find out things about myself,” she says. “So many of the people I play have felt like extensions of myself, and this is the first job where I’m asking myself, ‘Where do I start?'”

This story first appeared in the Sept. 4 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.