Thomas Doherty has made a serious splash in season 2 of Inform Me Lies as Leo, however there was a deeper motive underlying the actor’s pull to the present.
“I actually noticed quite a lot of my youthful self in Leo, for positive,” Doherty tells PEOPLE of the character, the brand new love curiosity for Lucy (Grace Van Patten) who throws a wrench within the unending cycle of her and Stephen’s (Jackson White) relationship.
“I imply, I am 29 now, Leo’s not fairly there but. However I do not know… I assume that younger grownup, you allow house and also you’re in school for the primary time and also you’re by yourself and also you’re making an attempt to determine who you might be as an individual and create this sense of self, however you are thrust into this atmosphere with tons of and 1000’s of different folks doing the identical factor.”
In episode 6, which premiered on Oct. 2, followers bought a deeper look into Leo’s life and his previous, as he revealed to Lucy that his anger points stem from his personal experiences rising up in an abusive family. In an emotional scene — that preceded their breakup — after Lucy slapped Diana (Alicia Crowder), Leo revealed that his dad used to hit him and would do the identical to his mother — till someday, he fought again.
“You see in a while within the collection form of why Leo is the way in which that Leo is. And I positively recognized quite a bit with him in that regard — in that storyline for him and eager to be his personal man and be a greater particular person,” Doherty says of Leo’s backstory. “And I actually, actually love the need for form of self-improvement [Leo has].”
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The Gossip Woman alum says that he not solely associated to Leo, however he additionally discovered from him.
“Doing what he is doing, his personal self-exploration and his personal work, coupled with this new lady that he’s form of falling for, coupled along with her previous and their relationship, it was an enormous form of mess of potential anxiety-inducing breakdown stuff. However I even discovered from it as effectively. When Leo was confronted with an exterior impediment, he positively tuned into himself, and I’ve positively taken an enormous chunk of that and tried to do this in my very own life.”
It is no shock that Doherty was offered on the function early on. “I already had my thoughts made up that I wished to do it, however then assembly Grace [Van Patten], I used to be like, ‘I’ve set to work with this lady,'” he says, referring to a meet-up at a espresso store he and Van Patten, 27, organized earlier than their chemistry learn.
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“I by no means need to go in chilly being like, ‘Hello, good to satisfy you, be my girlfriend for an hour.’ So I wished to only really feel her vitality and really feel the place she was at,” he recollects. “For some motive, I believed I used to be going to go meet Lucy — that is how good she is at performing, I believed I used to be assembly Lucy. I keep in mind I walked into the espresso store prepared for Lucy, after which I simply noticed Grace pop up and I used to be like, ‘Oh.'”
“If I needed to do the remainder of my profession working with Grace, I would be a contented man. She’s simply an unbelievable human being, unbelievable actor, so humorous, so good — only a fantastic, fantastic human. And so yeah, the chemistry, it actually simply got here naturally.”
As a lot as he raves about working with Van Patten and the remainder of the solid, Doherty admits that he felt “emotionally drained” after lengthy days on set.
“It is a very intense world, for positive,” he says, earlier than sharing what he thinks followers will want for the previous few episodes of the season: “Chamomile tea is what they want.”
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New episodes of Inform Me Lies season 2 premiere Wednesdays at 12:00 a.m. ET on Hulu by Oct. 16.
