Courtesy of Freeform/ABC Family
Series star Troian Bellisario reacts to people "dropping like flies" in Rosewood.
[Warning: This story contains spoilers from Pretty Little Liars' midseason premiere, "Of Late I Think of Rosewood."]
For six seasons of Pretty Little Liars, Alison DiLaurentis laid in the casket of the show’s opening credits, but now someone else is taking her place in the grave.
Ali brought her friends back to Rosewood to help with her sister Charlotte’s trial, but they're going to end up sticking around for a lot longer. Just after Charlotte was released, she allegedly committed suicide, but when the autopsy revealed that she was actually murdered, the Liars were forced to stay in town and get to the bottom of the crime. Deja vu, much?
When The Hollywood Reporter caught up with the cast ahead of the premiere, they shared their reactions to the new person in the grave.
“I was mostly pretty pissed off that we had someone in the grave, because I was just super excited to get boring for a little while,” Troian Bellisario tells THR. “We could watch Hanna work in the fashion industry in New York and watch Aria be a book editor."
“It would be kind of boring, but because I love the girls and not just their drama, I was more interested in what their personal lives were gonna be,” Bellisario continues. “And as soon as someone was in the grave, I was like, ‘Ah, crap! Now we have to go deal with this again in Rosewood.’ That was mostly the surprise, like God — people are dropping like flies still!”
Lucy Hale wasn't as shocked by this reveal as some of the past deaths on the show. “I kind of knew what was going on in the show, so it was something I kind of expected,” she says.
In a way, history is repeating itself with the casket. Just like how the show first started in season one with the Liars reuniting because of Alison, Charlotte's death forces them to stay together after five years apart.
“It was really cool in our writers’ room because they got to approach this new premiere as sort of a second pilot. If you remember back to the first pilot, when you first meet these girls, they were all brought back together because Alison’s body was found,” Bellisario says. “So that’s kind of who the person that we’re all standing over is — we’ve all scattered to the winds for the last five years and lived different lives, and now it’s the same thing where it brings us back. There’s that tension and maybe relationships that aren’t resolved.”
Pretty Little Liars airs on Tuesdays at 8 p.m. on Freeform.
Pretty Little Liars
