When I ask Cat Missal, somewhat in jest, if the message after the Tell Me Lies season three finale is that 90% of men would manipulate you if given the chance, she pauses before answering.
“Well, I am gay, so thank God,” Missal says with a laugh, sitting in a conference room at the Teen Vogue offices with her partner, Jess, by her side. Jess grins and looks at her: “You're safe with me.”
Hulu’s hit toxic-romance drama has officially come to an end with season three, which aired its final episode on February 17. Three seasons may not be a lot for another kind of show, but in the Tell Me Lies universe, so many events are happening in any given episode that it feels like more time. Missal herself says she’s only watched bits and pieces, and remembering everything in interviews just reminds her how much is going on at all times.
“I'm like, ‘Oh my God, and this happens and this happens and this happens and this happens,” the 26-year-old says. “So many bad things that I'm just processing the trauma of it all.”
Fortunately, Missal has not experienced anywhere near the level of trauma of her character, Bree, whose mom had her when she was just 14, and who grew up in foster care. But Missal does see some of herself in Bree’s journey over the course of the show, and how she reckons with understanding her childhood, and who she is becoming as an adult. (Plus, they’re both from New Jersey.)
“It's that feeling of rediscovering yourself when you're older and trying to connect it to how you actually felt,” Missal says. “I definitely had a bit of that with acting.”
Missal is the fifth of six children in her family, and many of her siblings are in entertainment (Donna and Steve are musicians; Becky is an influencer; Kelley is an actor). Missal remembers watching her sisters do community theater and asking her mom for her chance.
“When I was five, she put me in a show,” Missal recalls, “and, surprisingly enough, a manager saw that show and approached them afterwards. My parents were pretty weirded out. They were like, ‘I don't know, not yet.’” They waited a couple years, and then Missal began doing more theater, including stints on Broadway in Mary Poppins and A Tale of Two Cities.
Now Missal looks back and feels that acting was so fun to do as a kid and has brought her so many opportunities as an adult, but that it also was maybe an odd way to grow up. “I don't know if I really had a concept of [what I was doing]. I just was doing something that I loved,” she says. “It's strange when you're a kid—which actually relates a lot to the storyline that Bree's got this season, because she says quite often this season that she can't really remember her childhood much.”
As an adult Missal has crafted her own life as an actor and person. She lives with her partner in the Valley and they have two cats, named Chicken and Bunny. She loves to hike, which she takes very seriously as a solo adventure: “I'm an extreme hiker; I'll go for hours at a time.”
When I ask how they met, Jess reveals it was at a drag show in West Hollywood, and two of Missal’s sisters were there. “I just thought you were so cool,” Missal tells Jess. “It just felt kismet because they were like, ‘Who are you flirting with? Who's that?’ And now we're all family.”
Post-Tell Me Lies, Missal would really like to get another job, she jokes. Something with “some grit to it,” maybe, or a sci-fi project (she loves the movie Alien). She’d also like to continue making music; she contributed two songs to the Tell Me Lies soundtrack, including a haunting cover of “Mr. Brightside.”
“[When showrunner Meaghan Oppenheimer asked me for music for the show,] it made it feel all the more real," Missal recalls. "It's something tangible that I could maybe see myself doing, which is really exciting.”
The Tell Me Lies finale pulls off an interesting twist: Bree is revealed to be the one who released the tape of Lucy (Grace Van Patten) confessing to lying about rape (she’s blackmailed into doing so by Stephen, played by Jackson White, who threatens to tell Bree that Lucy slept with Bree’s boyfriend, Evan). As season three progresses, both Lucy and Bree are pushed to a breaking point, surrounded by men who range from truly evil to malevolently opportunistic. In the last 15 minutes, Bree tells Lucy that they can’t be friends if Lucy rides off into the sunset with Stephen. Of course, Lucy does just that.
Missal, however, has a more optimistic view of where Bree and Lucy’s friendship goes from here, in her imaginary head-canon of the show. “I truly think friendship can stand the test of anything,” she says. “Even though they've done toxic things to each other, they do love each other genuinely. I think that's where a lot of the heart of the show lies, too, within their friendship, even though it's built on lies.”
At one point in the last episode, Bree confides in her childhood friend and former foster-sibling Alex about some of what she’s going through. He tells her that you can’t really trust anyone all the way, and that she should give only 70% to 80% of herself to people.
Missal, again, takes a more positive view of relationships—and how we decide how much of what makes us vulnerable to keep for ourselves. “I would say you can give 100% of yourself to people, just not 100% of the time,” she says. “You can let people in and have them be a part of your life in a meaningful way, where they truly know who you are, without it taking over every part of your life.”
