In this Liv Tyler interview about The Leftovers, Mary and Blake talk with the actress behind Meg Abbott about why she pursued the HBO series, what drew her to one of the show’s most unsettling characters and how playing Meg allowed her to explore a side of herself she had never really used on screen before.

Tyler also digs into Meg’s relationship with the Guilty Remnant, why Miracle makes her so angry, the shocking Evie reveal at the end of Season 2, filming the infamous scenes with Tommy and the school bus, and the moment director Peter Berg essentially told her to trust herself, swing the axe and just make sure she did not get hurt.

This interview was originally recorded while The Leftovers Season 3 was in production, so the conversation captures Tyler and the fandom before anyone knew exactly how the series would end. Looking back now, it is also a fascinating snapshot of how much even the actors were asked to embrace uncertainty while working on a show built around the fact that some answers simply never arrive.

Archive note: This conversation was recorded before The Leftovers Season 3 aired. It contains full spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2, including Meg Abbott’s evolution, the Guilty Remnant, Miracle and the Season 2 reveal involving Evie Murphy.

Listen To Our Liv Tyler Interview

Liv Tyler joins Mary and Blake to talk about finding The Leftovers, auditioning for Meg Abbott, working with Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta’s storytelling, discovering Meg’s anger and fearlessness, filming in New York and Texas, and what she would actually do if a Sudden Departure happened in real life.

Listen Right Here

Watch On YouTube →

Explore Our Complete Leftovers Archive

Our original Living Reminders archive includes episode discussions, series analysis and conversations with members of the cast and creative team behind one of our favorite television series.

Explore The Leftovers →

Why Liv Tyler Wanted To Join The Leftovers

Tyler told us that she was at a point in her career where she no longer wanted to simply wait for whatever movie roles happened to arrive. She had become increasingly interested in television and wanted to actively look for material that excited her, particularly something built around a strong ensemble.

Television also offered a rhythm she had experienced only rarely in film. Tyler compared it to the extended experience of making The Lord of the Rings: returning to the same collaborators, inhabiting a character over a longer period and discovering new pieces of that person rather than saying goodbye after a few months.

She also wanted a project that could coexist with being a mother. Rather than continually leaving home for months at a time to make films, she was looking for something creatively substantial that could also fit the life she wanted outside the industry.

Why Liv Tyler Was Immediately Drawn To Meg

The funny part is that Tyler could not completely explain why Meg grabbed her. She described her relationship with characters almost like attraction between people: sometimes something simply clicks before you can intellectually explain why.

Meg was not even originally written as an obvious Liv Tyler role. Tyler remembered the character description being for a younger redheaded woman, but she pushed for the audition anyway. She came in with her own interpretation of Meg, and Damon Lindelof later joked that his reaction to the tape was essentially that Liv Tyler looked furious.

That instinct turned out to be exactly what the character needed. Even before Meg becomes one of the most frightening forces in Season 2, Tyler was already playing somebody whose apparently ordinary exterior was covering anger, frustration and a desperate search for something larger.

Meg Forced Liv Tyler To Stop Overthinking

Tyler described Meg as profoundly different from herself. Her normal acting process involved studying, researching and trying to understand why a character behaves the way she does, but Meg frequently required the opposite approach. Tyler had to trust impulses she would normally question.

That became especially important because The Leftovers actors often did not know what was coming. Tyler said that uncertainty initially bothered her because she wanted something solid to ground the performance in. Eventually, however, the mystery became part of what she enjoyed about making the show.

In a strange way, that acting process mirrors the experience of watching The Leftovers. The performer and the audience are both being asked to inhabit the emotional truth of a moment before they necessarily understand the entire structure around it.

What Changed In Meg Between Seasons 1 And 2?

Tyler saw Season 2 Meg as someone who had gained confidence and shed much of the vulnerability that defined her earlier appearances. The Guilty Remnant gave Meg something to believe in and somewhere to direct the anger and confusion she had been carrying.

Tyler was careful not to describe that development as healthy growth. What Meg finds is power. She becomes fearless, focused and increasingly willing to use other people’s sense of safety against them.

That distinction is important to understanding why Meg becomes so unsettling. She has found herself in one sense, but the self she discovers is willing to turn grief into ideology and ideology into action.

What Does Meg Actually Believe?

One of the interesting things about Meg is that she does not seem particularly attached to the rituals of the Guilty Remnant. She talks when she wants to talk, questions the old rules and seems much more interested in whether an action actually forces people to remember the Departure.

Tyler described Meg as someone continually asking how to make the movement more effective. For Meg, the central problem is that people want to settle back into normal life. The Guilty Remnant exists to tell them that normality is gone and that pretending otherwise is another form of denial.

That is why the school-bus stunt makes sense within her logic. The point is not random destruction. It is to destroy the feeling that ordinary life has become safe again. Meg wants people to understand that even when nothing happens, something could.

Why Does Meg Hate Miracle So Much?

Tyler’s interpretation was that Meg feels tricked. Her mother dies suddenly just before the Departure, leaving Meg with grief that cannot be neatly categorized inside the global catastrophe that follows. Everybody else is obsessed with understanding where the departed went, while Meg is still trying to understand a death that had nothing supernatural about it.

Miracle seems to promise the possibility of an answer. Meg goes there searching for something that might explain why her life feels so fundamentally wrong, and she does not find it. Tyler did not claim to know exactly what Isaac tells Meg or precisely which single thing pushes her over the edge, but she saw the anger as the accumulated result of everything Meg has been carrying.

That interpretation makes Miracle less a place Meg hates for theological reasons and more a symbol of another promise that the universe refuses to keep.

Did Liv Tyler Know The Evie Twist Was Coming?

Not really. Tyler said the cast experienced many of the show’s reveals in much the same way the audience did. Scripts arrived piece by piece, actors traded theories with each other and even people performing inside the story were sometimes left wondering how long the writers had known where everything was going.

She also did not pretend to have a definitive answer for exactly how Meg and Evie established their relationship after meeting in Miracle. Like the audience, she could imagine possibilities and occasionally ask Damon Lindelof or Tom Perrotta what something meant, but sometimes she deliberately avoided solving the entire puzzle.

That uncertainty is part of what makes the interview interesting now. Even the person playing Meg was sometimes protecting the mystery instead of reducing the character to a perfectly solved psychological diagram.

The Axe Scene Helped Liv Tyler Unlock The Character

One of Tyler’s favorite memories came from early in Season 1, when Meg attacks the tree with an axe. The production was running out of daylight, the scene had originally been more elaborate and there was barely time to rehearse what was becoming a very physical and emotionally exposed moment.

Director Peter Berg responded by giving Tyler exactly the kind of direction the situation required. Rather than burying her in explanation, he essentially told her that she was a great actress, she could handle the scene and she simply needed to trust herself and avoid getting hurt.

Tyler remembered that as an awakening both for herself and for Meg. The scene forced her to surrender some of the self-consciousness she had been carrying and discover the more instinctive, aggressive part of the character that would eventually become essential to Season 2.

What Liv Tyler Saw In Meg And Tommy’s Van Scene

The scene between Meg and Tommy in the van is deliberately uncomfortable because intimacy, aggression and threat all occupy the same space. Tyler had only recently returned to work after having a baby when she filmed it, and even she initially found the material difficult to understand from the page alone.

Once they began performing it, however, Tyler found a useful connection between the characters. Both Meg and Tommy are desperate for human connection, both are searching for something larger than themselves and both carry enormous amounts of anger.

That does not make the scene tender in any conventional way. It makes it recognizable as another Leftovers relationship in which damaged people reach toward each other using whatever emotional language they still know how to speak.

New York And Texas Felt Like Two Different Leftovers

Tyler said the production environments for the first two seasons almost reflected the seasons themselves. New York was brutally cold, gray and physically difficult, which matched a first season dominated by grief, absence and suffering.

Moving production to Texas for Season 2 created an entirely different energy. Austin felt warmer, stranger and more expansive, which mirrored the way the series itself opened up when the story moved to Miracle.

Tyler also loved the sense of community created by filming away from home. Rather than briefly visiting somewhere as a tourist, the cast lived there long enough to experience the place together, helping create the camaraderie she had been looking for when she decided she wanted to work in television.

Would Liv Tyler Join The Guilty Remnant?

Definitely not. When we asked what she would actually do after an event like the Sudden Departure, Tyler said her instinct would be intensely practical: gather her family, get away from the city and find somewhere protected where they could prepare for whatever might happen next.

She even admitted that she had thought through versions of that problem in real life, including how she might get her family and pets out of New York if something catastrophic happened. Her response was almost the inverse of Meg’s. Instead of weaponizing uncertainty, Liv Tyler’s instinct would be to protect the people closest to her.

That contrast may be part of why Meg was so creatively liberating for her. She got to inhabit a person whose response to fear, uncertainty and loss was almost completely unlike her own.

Even Liv Tyler Did Not Want All The Answers

When we asked Tyler what she actually felt while watching The Leftovers, she kept returning to the layers inside the characters and the pleasure of not completely knowing what would happen. She loved that the series refused to keep its people on the surface.

That observation gets to something fundamental about the show. The Leftovers is built around an impossible event, but its real subject is what people do when certainty disappears. Every character constructs a different answer because none of them can actually prove what the correct answer is.

Meg’s answer happens to be terrifying. But Tyler’s performance works because she never treats Meg merely as a villain who knows she is wrong. Meg has found something that feels like truth to her, and that conviction is what makes her dangerous.

Can You Actually Cry While Eating Baby Carrots?

For all the conversation about grief, cults, trauma and the end of civilization, we could not let Liv Tyler leave without addressing one of Season 2’s great unanswered questions. Evie tells Meg that it is impossible to cry while eating baby carrots. Was that actually true?

According to Tyler: not really. She kept crying. The carrots may provide enough distraction to interrupt the feeling for a moment, but they are apparently not a foolproof defense against sadness. Somewhere, Damon Lindelof probably owes science an explanation.

More From The Leftovers

We Still Love Talking About Stories Like This

The Leftovers may be over, but the conversations it started are exactly the kind we still love having: why characters behave the way they do, how stories create meaning without giving us every answer and what happens when television leaves enough space for us to bring part of ourselves into the interpretation.

Join The Nerd Clan →

Meg Was Scary Because Liv Tyler Believed Her

What comes through most clearly in this conversation is that Tyler never needed to turn Meg into a puzzle she could completely solve. She understood the grief, the anger, the search for meaning and the strange liberation Meg found once she stopped trying to fit herself back into an ordinary life.

That may be why Meg remains so unnerving. The performance does not ask us to believe that she is evil simply because the story needs an antagonist. Tyler plays her as someone who has finally found certainty in a world where certainty disappeared. The tragedy is that the thing making Meg feel whole is exactly what makes her capable of tearing everybody else apart.