Tyriq Withers in Tell Me Lies plays Tim, a member of the Baird College social circle who appears during the drama’s first season. Tim is not one of the programme’s central characters, but the role belongs to an important period in Withers’ career, when several Atlanta-based productions helped him move from college football into professional acting.
Since that 2022 appearance, Withers has progressed rapidly. He delivered a striking performance in Donald Glover’s Atlanta, entered established horror territory with I Know What You Did Last Summer, led the Jordan Peele-produced sports horror film Him and became Ledger Ward in the screen adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s Reminders of Him.
Revisiting Tim now provides a useful view of an actor before the industry had fully decided how to use him.
Who Does Tyriq Withers Play in Tell Me Lies?
Withers appears as Tim in six episodes of the first season. The character is a friend of Wrigley, Stephen and Evan within the wider group of students at the fictional Baird College.
Tim operates around the edges of the central drama rather than driving it. Tell Me Lies focuses primarily on the destructive relationship between Lucy Albright, played by Grace Van Patten, and Stephen DeMarco, played by Jackson White.
Their relationship begins at college and develops through attraction, manipulation, secrecy and emotional dependency. The surrounding students are not merely background figures; they create the social environment that allows private behaviour to acquire public consequences.
Tim belongs to that environment. His presence helps make Baird feel like a functioning campus rather than a closed set occupied only by the lead couple.
This is common in ensemble television. Supporting characters establish how friendship groups behave when the main plot is not demanding their attention. Parties, casual conversations and shared routines give the drama a credible social texture.
Withers does not receive the kind of emotional showcase he would later find in Atlanta or Him. The value of the role lies partly in its restraint. He contributes to the world without trying to turn every appearance into an audition for a larger storyline.
Why the Role Can Be Easy to Miss
Viewers discovering Withers through his later films may expect Tim to have a major romantic or dramatic arc. He does not.
His first-season appearances are distributed across the college ensemble, where attention shifts rapidly between relationships, betrayals and private conflicts. Tim is one of several students who make the group seem larger than the immediate circle of Lucy, Stephen, Bree, Pippa, Wrigley and Evan.
That limited role explains why searches for Withers and the series often provide little more than a character name. Tim was not designed to reveal the actor’s full range.
Yet small television roles can be professionally significant even when they are narratively modest. They give emerging actors experience with continuing characters, production schedules and the technical demands of episodic filmmaking.
They also place performers inside casting networks. Directors, producers and casting teams do not evaluate only the finished scene. They observe preparation, adaptability and how reliably an actor works within an ensemble.
Withers’ career after Tell Me Lies suggests that the industry recognised capabilities extending well beyond Tim.
From Florida State Football to Acting
Before becoming an actor, Withers attended Florida State University and played football as a wide receiver.
Sport had shaped much of his identity. The shift towards acting began when he auditioned for a production organised by the university’s Black Student Union and secured the lead role.
The experience gave him a different form of performance. Football required physical preparation, tactical discipline and public execution under pressure. Acting retained some of those demands while allowing him to explore emotion and identity more directly.
Withers eventually left football behind and moved towards professional screen work. That transition involved more than exchanging one ambition for another. It required him to reconsider how he measured his personal value.
In an interview with NME, Withers discussed grieving the version of himself associated with sport. That insight later became especially relevant to Him, in which athletic ambition is turned into psychological horror.
His football background gave him physical credibility, but the emotional consequences of leaving the sport may have been equally useful to his acting.
Atlanta as the Real Starting Point
Withers moved to Atlanta to pursue professional roles. The city provided a practical route into the industry at a time when Georgia had become one of America’s most active production centres.
In 2022, he appeared in three projects connected to Atlanta’s screen economy: Tell Me Lies, The Game and Donald Glover’s Atlanta.
The concentration matters. Emerging actors outside Los Angeles or New York can struggle to accumulate useful credits because productions are scattered and professional networks take years to form. Atlanta offered Withers access to several sets within one regional industry.
Each production asked for something different.
The Game connected naturally to his knowledge of football. Tell Me Lies placed him within a young ensemble drama. Atlanta gave him a complex leading role for a single episode.
Together, those jobs created a better demonstration of range than any one of them could have provided independently.
The non-obvious story of Withers’ breakthrough is therefore geographical. His career was not built by arriving in Hollywood and immediately landing a studio lead. It developed through an Atlanta production network capable of turning a newcomer into a working screen actor.
The Real Campus Behind Baird College
Although Tell Me Lies is set largely at the fictional Baird College in upstate New York, its first two seasons were filmed principally in Georgia. Agnes Scott College in Decatur supplied the campus seen on screen.
The production used the college’s historic architecture, lawns and pathways to create the appearance of an elite north-eastern institution. Baird banners and set dressing completed the transformation.
This is a convincing piece of geographic misdirection. The audience reads the campus as New York because the story, costumes and seasonal details instruct it to do so. The actual buildings belong to a private women’s liberal arts college near Atlanta.
Decatur’s official tourism site lists Agnes Scott College among the local filming locations used by Tell Me Lies. The campus has also appeared in other productions, making it part of Georgia’s wider screen history.
Visitors should remember that Agnes Scott remains a working educational institution rather than a television attraction. Public access should be approached respectfully, with formal campus tours or accessible surrounding areas preferred over disrupting students.
The location nevertheless adds another layer to Withers’ story. He had attended university in Florida, moved to Atlanta to act and then found himself playing a college student on a Georgia campus pretending to be in New York.
The Atlanta Episode That Changed His Trajectory
Withers’ most important 2022 performance came in “Rich Wigga, Poor Wigga”, an anthology-style episode from the third season of Atlanta.
He plays Aaron, a biracial high-school student whose racial identity becomes the subject of a humiliating test after a wealthy alumnus offers to pay tuition fees for the school’s Black students.
The episode is provocative, uncomfortable and deliberately difficult to categorise. Aaron’s behaviour, appearance and relationship with his Black father complicate any simple answer about identity.
For Withers, the role required far more than charm or physical presence. He had to portray insecurity, resentment, opportunism and confusion without turning Aaron into a diagram of the episode’s ideas.
The performance resonated partly because Withers could draw upon aspects of his own experience as a mixed-race man who may be perceived differently by different people.
It also proved that he could carry an episode built around social tension and ambiguity. That was the real bridge between his early television work and later film leads.
Casting director Carmen Cuba, who worked on Atlanta, later became involved in the casting of Him. The connection shows how one carefully observed performance can travel through an industry network.
From Tim to a New Kind of Horror Actor
Withers moved into feature-film horror through I Know What You Did Last Summer and Him, both released in 2025.
In I Know What You Did Last Summer, he plays Teddy Spencer, entering a franchise defined by youthful secrets, guilt and a killer returning from the past. The role introduced him to a broad audience already familiar with the property.
Him gave him more demanding material. Withers stars as Cameron Cade, a talented football player whose career appears threatened after a violent attack. He is invited to train with legendary quarterback Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans, at an isolated compound.
The opportunity gradually becomes a nightmare about ambition, masculinity, physical sacrifice and the systems surrounding professional sport.
Withers’ background made him an obvious physical fit, but director Justin Tipping reportedly responded to qualities beyond athleticism. Cam needed ambition and vulnerability at the same time. The audience had to believe that he could become powerful while sensing that his desire for approval made him exploitable.
That combination was not visible in the limited role of Tim. It was present, however, in the trajectory between Tell Me Lies, Atlanta and Withers’ later leading work.
Reminders of Him and the Move into Romance
In 2026, Withers played Ledger Ward opposite Maika Monroe in Reminders of Him, adapted from Colleen Hoover’s novel.
The story follows Kenna Rowan after her release from prison as she attempts to reconnect with the daughter she has never been able to raise. Ledger, a former friend of the child’s late father, becomes one of the few people willing to see Kenna as more than the worst event of her life.
The role required Withers to shift away from horror and towards romantic drama. Ledger is protective and emotionally guarded, but the film depends on his ability to make care, conflict and attraction visible without the heightened devices of a thriller.
This transition expanded Withers’ screen identity. An emerging actor who becomes associated too quickly with one genre may find future casting restricted. Moving from sports horror to romance demonstrated that his leading-man potential was not dependent on physical threat.
It also created an interesting contrast with Tell Me Lies. Both productions examine intimacy, guilt and the ways relationships are shaped by withheld information. Their emotional ethics, however, are very different.
Tell Me Lies studies attraction as a mechanism of manipulation. Reminders of Him asks whether intimacy can support accountability and repair.
What Tell Me Lies Reveals in Retrospect
Tim is not Tyriq Withers’ breakthrough performance. That distinction belongs more convincingly to Aaron in Atlanta, with Him establishing him as a feature-film lead.
His work in Tell Me Lies remains valuable because it captures the apprenticeship stage immediately before that rise.
There is a tendency to rewrite an actor’s early career once success arrives. Small roles are described as hidden evidence of future stardom, as though every brief appearance contained the complete performer waiting to be discovered.
Tim does not need to carry that burden. The role is more interesting as evidence of Withers learning how to function inside a television ensemble while building professional relationships in Atlanta.
A career is rarely formed by one miraculous audition. It is assembled from overlapping opportunities, regional production networks and roles of very different sizes.
For Withers, Tell Me Lies was part of that accumulation. The series gave him experience and visibility; Atlanta revealed his dramatic range; Him tested whether he could lead a studio film; and Reminders of Him widened the kind of leading man he could become.
Watching Tim now means seeing the stage before the breakout—not because the character predicts everything that followed, but because the work helped make what followed possible.
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