Like the audience, Lucy is now left to grapple with the reality that Stephen’s charismatic personality belies his deeply manipulative, and borderline sociopathic, nature. “Jackson is clearly a master at playing all of those levels, so you never really know what is preconceived, what is spur of the moment, what is calculated, what is reactive,” says Rafaeli. (White, to his credit, says that he has always tried to bring a “sense of humor” and “lightness” to the character, even though “he does some really bad things.”)
Given that she has “known a lot of people that would be labeled narcissists” in her own life, Oppenheimer feels a particular sense of empathy for Stephen, even though she does not condone his actions.
“I don’t like to think that most people are just born a certain way. Of course, there are things that are unchangeable in all of us, but I do think Stephen, to a large extent, is a product of his environment,” she explains. “He grew up in a situation where love was a currency, and it was something you gamble with, something that is taken away and given as a reward. If your initial role models for love are so unstable, you aren’t given a f*cking chance. You have to have so much luck to get out of that — and he didn’t have that.”
The showrunner knows that viewers have spent a long time questioning whether Stephen truly has the capacity for change. “I feel like we answer the question of Stephen’s morality, to a degree, in a fun way, which I think people will be surprised by,” she teases.
While penning the second season, Oppenheimer and the rest of her writers’ room got into a heated debate over how Lucy handled Pippa being sexually assaulted by Lydia’s brother, Chris, at a party. With Pippa refusing to come forward or press charges against Chris, Lucy falsely claims she was also one of his victims so that he might face accountability — only for that decision to completely backfire on her.
