Spoilers ahead for the ending of We Were Liarsnow streaming on Prime Video.
Emily Alyn Lind remembers the first time she was screwed over in Hollywood. “But I’m not going to tell you about it,” the 23-year-old We Were Liars star says over coffee at the Plaza Hotel, her low voice almost drawling.
She was pretty young at the time — Lind has been acting for more than 17 years at this point — and it involved someone previously on her team, likely years ago.
“I came out of the room kicking and screaming with my mind made up, super stubborn person,” she recalls. “I’m a bit blunt, when I have to be. I don’t have a problem with looking someone in the eyes and saying, ‘You f*cked up.’ And I didn’t have a problem doing that when I was small either.” That was “daunting” to people, she says, even her family. “I’m like, ‘Dudes do it. Watch me.’”
She wonders if she was cooler then, more fearless. Youthful bravery gets beaten out of you as you grow up, especially if you’re a girl. But it might have been more like “fake confidence,” she muses, not built in anything solid, not earned. As a kid, she always wanted to take the shortcut, the way child actors can — on set, you magically become an adult, or at least have to act like one. Professional, rule-abiding, mature. Learn early to expect that people will lie to you. Don’t trust anyone too much. Don’t give away your vulnerability to anyone but the audience.
“Then I realized that I was losing a lot of the important stuff in my life,” she says. “[I was trying to] slide by without being caught by life, by whatever god you might pray to. It stopped working.”
Lind quotes, almost offhand, the Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chödrön: “Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is truly indestructible in ourselves be found.” Or: you have to open yourself up over and over again, despite knowing you might be safer otherwise, despite knowing there will be pain, in order to grow.
Jessie Redmond/Prime Video
It’s a 75-degree day in New York City, but Lind’s outfit indicates she hasn’t yet left the hotel lobby this morning: a long black blazer overcoat down to her ankles, a silk skirt, and stompy scuffed Doc Marten platforms, blonde hair in a messy bun. She looks around the Plaza’s cafe and reminisces about filming an episode of Gossip Girl here, several years ago.
About The Author
