The main character in The Liar cannot stop himself from lying, even when the situation threatens to spiral out of control and the consequences could be steep. We asked our cast to share a lie they once told that they didn’t get away with (…or maybe one that they did!)

Samuel Ashdown (Philiste): When I was in high school I ditched out of class and drove to the beach to go surfing for the day. When I got home, sunburned and sandy, with my surfboard strapped to the top of my car, my mom wasn’t too convinced.

LaShawn Banks (Cliton): When I was in the second grade, my mom was working full time and putting herself through school. I, being too young to understand how difficult and courageous that was and how proud I should have been, told my class, when asked what our parents do, that my mom was a music teacher. A complete and total lie. Not even a good one. Naturally my teacher mentioned my fabrication at the next parent/teacher conferences, to my mother’s horror and surprise. Caught! Let’s just say I deserved every second of the two week grounding I was given and much more. My poor mother.

Nate Burger (Dorante): In my final semester of college, I was taking a 300-level history seminar on the Hapsburg Empire. For one of our final assignments, we had to read a short novel about the Radetzky March and write an eight-page response; I did not even crack the book. About a week after it was actually due, I read about the first 100 pages, elaborated a lot about my ideas and response to that first third of the book, then created a dummy email account that had the same first three letters as my professor’s email account. I responded from the dummy email in the person of my “uncle”: something to the tune of, “sorry I never responded to this, Nate! I don’t check this email very often! Hope you got this in time!” and forwarded that email to my professor saying something like, “Oh my God – I must have emailed this to my uncle by accident! Hope this is okay?” He was a super understanding and genuinely good dude and gave me a 95% on the response. I really, really hope he never reads this.

Kalen Harriman (Lucrece): All I can say is that I am far more in line with Cliton; if I am actually able to manage a lie, it is completely by mistake! That being said, in middle school I lied about having my gym clothes so that I could get out of running the mile…needless to say, I didn’t cover all my bases and my teacher saw my gym clothes sitting in my locker, plain as day. Ooops!


Michael Perez (Alcippe): I think of the time that my four-year-old self sat on the counter telling my mom and dad that I definitely did not put that Skittle up my nose. I didn’t know how it got there. My dad got even with a lie that he DID get away with: in order to get this mystery Skittle out, he would need to use a power drill. There was some weeping involved.


Laura Rook (Clarice): I think I was just always taught that lying is the worst possible thing, so I never really got good at doing it. But because I was such a good kid, it made it a lot easier to lie about little things like lying to my parents about drinking. I also crushed my brothers and uncles in poker at Christmas once because no one expected me to bluff, and I pretended like I didn’t know what I was doing at the start. Then I took all of their pennies. Mwaahh ha ha!


Anne E. Thompson (Isabelle/Sabine): I seem to recall a very early summer camp experience where I claimed to be an expert at ping-pong. I think that I had maybe played it once or twice before in a friend’s basement. Of course, it didn’t take long for kids to discover that I had exaggerated my own ability. The first rainy day spent inside at camp, my “skill” had inexplicably disappeared.


Jonathan Weir (Geronte): I was in first grade and Sister Vanetta asked the class, “If you could have any parents in the world who would you choose?” I pondered and came up with the two most influential people in my life: Jerry Lewis and Doris Day. It seemed to me both a logical and thrilling prospect. Upon my arrival home my mother asked what had happened in school and I told her about sister’s question to the class. My mom asked, “Well, who did you say?” I looked at her and said “I said I wouldn’t want any other parents than you and dad.”