The Curious Case Of Lucy Hale, A Modern Multiplatform Star Who Keeps Cranking Out The Content

As many fans of movie stars from the ‘90s and ‘00s are aware, the direct-to-streaming pipeline has flooded the market with many opportunities to see former superstars stand around the sets of low-rent thrillers, often shot overseas, imprecisely recalling their glory days. Participation in these movies exists on a spectrum: Sometimes actors like Robert De Niro will pick up a quick paycheck part in between his more prestigious gigs. Sometimes actors like Nicolas Cage take a scattershot approach that includes plenty of junk alongside the occasional solid genre entry, weird experiment, or genuinely excellent film like Pig or Joe. And then there are “geezer teasers,” a genre wherein former Hollywood greats like Bruce Willis show up to a movie set for a few short days, shoot a few scenes, and collect a big paycheck. (There has been plenty written about the shady economics of this bizarre sub-industry, and we now know the sad reason why Willis was filming these.) Presumably, it’s a better pay-per-hour rate than signing up for a streaming TV series.

So what happens when a younger, less exhausted star enters into this world with the seeming desire to do Hollywood-style movies that big studios won’t fund? (For the sake of argument, Chad Michael Murray, who has costarred with Willis in multiple DTV productions, will not count as young.) Lucy Hale seems determined to find out. It’s not as if Hale has avoided television since the 2017 end of her hit show Pretty Little Liars. She starred in multiple series, including the ill-fated Riverdale spinoff Katy Keene for The CW as well as the recent Ragdoll. But since Liars has ended, she’s also embarked upon a semi-secret movie career.

For a while, it looked like she was going the scream-queen route, doing a pair of PG-13 horror movies with director Jeff Wadlow. After Truth or Dare and Fantasy Island both failed to make much impact at the box office, though, Hale has been starring in (and now executive-producing) smaller and less horror-centric films, made primarily for the streaming-rental market. In 2021, she put out the romantic comedy The Hating Game (which just landed on Hulu), along with Borrego, a thriller set on the U.S.-Mexico border.

In the tradition of indirect-to-video movies (Borrego received a modest, barely-there theatrical release), these projects sometimes come across like feature-length samples of fake movies thrown together for a cutaway gag in another movie. (Remember when romantic comedies were so flush that a movie like Friends with Benefits could have a rom-com-within-the-rom-com?) Unlike Willis or Cage or De Niro, Hale was never a big-name movie star, which also makes her starring roles seem like dispatches from an alternate universe where Lucy Hale deftly manages the demands of being the next Sandra Bullock.

That’s very much how these movies position her; they’re not Expendables-style all-star ensembles made up of fellow refugees from Freeform and The CW. (Again, Chad Michael Murray is busy trying to goad Bruce Willis into emoting.) Lucy Hale is the most famous face on screen. In a triumph of branding, her two most recent rom-coms have her playing characters named Lucy.

Yet recently, I chucked my responsibilities as a serious film critic, entered the Haleverse, watched The Hating Game, and found it kind of soothing. It’s not especially good—it treats the centuries-old notion that people who seem to hate each other at first might in fact be wildly attracted to each other as a fresh new gimmick, rather than the foundation of about half the rom-coms ever made—but it represents a vast improvement over A Nice Girl Like You, her shockingly terrible previous foray into a fictional Lucy’s love life. Freed of that movie’s cutesy (and secretly prudish) view of human sexuality, The Hating Game has moments that are genuinely sexy, when Hale and her costar Austin Stockwell actually look like they want to attack each other, romantically or not. As in Nice Girl, Hale is playing the stock part of uptight high-achiever; she has the obligatory publishing job, depicted with the usual inexpert shortcuts. Unlike the earlier film, here she actually manages to channel her Type A dedication into genuine desire. If it’s still a winning-heroine affect, there’s something coiled and pugnacious about it nonetheless.

Borrego places less emphasis on her hot-valedictorian-next-door star persona, but works even better as a movie. It has just five characters powering its minimalist story: Elly (Hale), a botanist, encounters drug mule Tomas (Leynar Gomez) while working in the desert; desperate to deliver his shipment to Guillermo (Jorge A. Jimenez), Tomas forces Elly to guide him through the desert, while local sheriff Jose (Nicholas Gonzalez) and his daughter Alex (Olivia Trujillo) work to track her down. Director Jesse Harris has an eye for big-canvas composition and moody lighting—or maybe he’s just taking full advantage of being shot almost entirely on location, something plenty of big-budget projects have eschewed in recent years.

Theis modest film occasionally sags under the weight of the self-importance that so often accompanies movies about the drug trade, as if solemn information displayed in on-screen text will turn any potboiler into a Traffic-style social-issue drama. Borrego doesn’t have anything compelling to say about its hero cop/ruthless dealer dichotomies; at its core, it’s a western. Not a postmodern western or a crime thriller with western undertones; a B-western made with a skeleton crew of a cast. Amidst its stand-offs and chases, the movie generates a surprising amount of dramatic tension from Hale and Gomez trudging through the desert, gaining some smaller understanding of each other without forming any bonds that test the boundaries of believability. It could almost pass muster as a theatrical release; there will certainly be less economical, worse-looking movies that play on 3,000 screens this year. With a few tweaks to the faux-contemporary opioid plot, it would nearly be ready to time-travel back to 1955.

Borrego underlines the appeal of Hale’s movie career: For all of its angling for the newfangled streaming business, and the way media convergence has enabled her multi-platform sorta-stardom (she got her start as a reality-competition singer, released an album in 2014, and has co-hosted New Year’s Rockin’ Eve multiple times), the movies she actually chooses to make are pretty old-fashioned. Rather than searching for a corner of a Marvel or Marvel-adjacent property to call her own—surely there’s room somewhere? Hale has chosen rom-coms, a western, and an odd-looking comedy called Big Gold Brick (which earned a stinky 20% on Rotten Tomatoes when it was released in February 2022).

This acts as a counterweight to Hollywood protocol that sends a lot of young actresses through multiple rounds of high school, literally and figuratively. Hale has that youthful look—wide-eyed and diminutive of stature, she could have spent the past decade playing college students and recent grads, like her 2018 Netflix movie Dude, where she was one of several well-established performers, all pushing 30 as they played high-school seniors. Maybe there’s something equally synthetic about a recent New Year’s Rockin’ Eve host pivoting to play a grieving botanist with a dark past. But Borrego has an earnest lack of pandering that makes it feel like it’s for adults, even if it’s not wildly sophisticated.

It’s also a stark contrast with how some older stars cash in on their fanbases, rather than challenging or even particularly trying to entertain them. Do the 24 million people who follow Lucy Hale on Instagram rent movies like The Hating Game (maybe) or Borrego (almost certainly not)? Do they watch movies at all? If not, it’s all the more interesting that Hale is making them anyway.

Jesse Hassenger is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com and tweets dumb jokes at @rockmarooned.