Lucy Hale Links up With ‘Call Her Daddy’ Host Alex Cooper for TV Show

Lucy Hale and Call Her Daddy host Alex Cooper are teaming up for a new show.

Deadline reports that Netflix has won a tense bidding war for Dead Letters, starring and executive produced by Hale. The series comes from Cooper’s Unwell Productions and Aaron Kaplan’s Kapital Entertainment.

An adaptation of the Caite Dolan-Leach 2017 novel of the same name, Dead Letters is described as “an addictive mystery whodunit-meets-psychological thriller centered on a pair of identical twin sisters, Ava and Zelda. When Ava returns home to the family vineyard in the wake of Zelda’s sudden death, she must find out who murdered her beloved twin while reckoning with dangerous revelations about the woman Zelda had become in her absence.”

“To complicate matters: Zelda knew she was in serious danger, so she left behind letters for Ava,” the description continues. “Zelda’s cryptic and gut-wrenching ‘dead letters’ send Ava on a twisted scavenger hunt for the truth — forcing Ava to question everyone she’s ever loved.”

Hale, who is playing the twins, had fallen in love with the book after reading it. She and her manager, Elissa Leeds, took the project to Kaplan, with whom she had been wanting to collaborate for a while. The series marks her return to television, having most notably starred on the teen drama Pretty Little Liars as Aria Montgomery from 2010 to 2017 for all seven seasons. She also starred on the short-lived CW shows Life Sentence and Katy Keene, and the AMC+ procedural Ragdoll.

She can most recently be seen in the 2024 films F*** Marry Kill and Running on Empty. Other credits include Which Brings Me to You, Puppy Love, Inside Man, The Hating Game, Riverdale, Fantasy Island, Truth or Dare, How I Met Your Mother, and Baby Daddy.

As for Cooper, she has gotten pretty big thanks to her podcast, Call Her Daddy. She is Spotify’s highest-earning female podcaster, with Call Her Daddy being the second most popular podcast globally on Spotify behind Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience. In 2021, Cooper signed a three-year exclusive deal with Spotify worth $60 million. Then, in 2024, she signed a $125 million three-year deal with SiriusXM, which replaced Spotify as her distribution beginning earlier this year.

Lucy Hale, writer Rachel Caris Love, director Liz Friedlander, and Caite Dolan-Leach executive produce alongside Aaron Kaplan of Kapital Entertainment, Brian Morewitz of Morewitz Media, Elissa Leeds of Reel Talent Management, Unwell’s principals Alex Cooper and Matt Kaplan, and head of TV Mina Lefevre. Jaiden Kaplan will serve as creative executive for Kapital, the studio.