Thomas Doherty had quite the introduction to Tell Me Lies’ cult fanbase.
The Scottish actor, 29, joined the Hulu drama’s second season as Leo, a new love interest for Lucy (Grace Van Patten) who threw another wrench between her and Stephen (Jackson White). It’s safe to say he didn’t totally know what he was getting into.
“I was not expecting it at all. I really wasn’t,” he tells PEOPLE of the fan response to the season, which premiered in September, during an interview at the Bowery Hotel ahead of his debut of the Glenlivet tartan. “It was huge. It was crazy.”
“Crazy” might not even fully cover it, as Doherty recalls a particularly memorable — albeit shocking — fan encounter he had.
“Some girl jumped out of an Uber in the middle of the road to get my number,” he reveals. “I gave it to her. I mean, you go to those lengths. It feels weird [not to].”
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The fan did text him, but he plays coy before admitting they never ended up seeing each other. He says, “I don’t know, I was busy.”
Still, “That was kind of crazy,” he says. “And I kept getting sent these TikTok [edits] and I didn’t have TikTok so I had to download TikTok.”
“It’s an amazing show,” Doherty continues. “I mean, [creator] Meaghan Oppenheimer really killed it. She really, really did. And you’ve got such an amazing cast in Grace Van Patten and Jackson White. Such talented people. They’re so fun.”
Doherty previously told PEOPLE that he “identified a lot” with the storyline of his character, as Leo was juggling all of the nuances of leaving home and “trying to establish who you are as a person and create this sense of self.”
“I really saw a lot of my younger self in Leo, for sure,” he said prior to the show’s release. “You see later on in the series kind of why Leo is the way that Leo is. And I definitely identified a lot with him in that regard — in that storyline for him and wanting to be his own man and be a better person. And I really, really love the desire for kind of self-improvement [Leo has].”
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Tell Me Lies seasons 1 and 2 can be streamed in full on Hulu.
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