After spending 65 weeks on the New York Times bestseller charts, author Laura Dave’s mystery-thriller The Last Thing He Told Me is finally heading to the small screen for a limited miniseries on Apple TV+. Produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine in partnership with 20th Century Fox, the seven-episode series starring Jennifer Garner and Angourie Rice is already teeing itself up as one of our next, delicious summer binges! In an exclusive interview with Collider, the show’s leads reveal what it was like taking on their very complex roles, which involved the pair getting into a newfound “headspace” outside their filmography.
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The limited series, premiering April 14 with a two-episode drop followed by the rest debuting on a weekly basis until May 19, follows Hannah (Garner), a woman forced to develop a relationship with her 16-year-old stepdaughter Bailey (Rice) in order to find out the truth about why her husband Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has mysteriously disappeared. Adapted and created by Dave for screen alongside her husband and co-creator Josh Singer, Garner also serves as an executive producer alongside Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter. With the series boasting an impressive production and writing team, The Last Thing He Told Me also features stellar performances from Coster-Waldau, Aisha Tyler, and Victor Garber, who Garner tells Collider during our Q&A interview that she was excited to share the screen with once again following their five years on the hit ABC spy drama, Alias.

COLLIDER: I’m so happy to talk to you both today about the show. First, Jennifer, if I may, I just wanted to say, I have been one of your biggest fans since I was 16. Alias meant everything to me. It was like — I cannot even put into words how much that show meant to me growing up and how much it gave me so much confidence too. So thank you, from me and from all the fans who felt the same way about that show.

JENNIFER GARNER: Thanks so much. That’s so kind of you. Thank you. Were you surprised to see Victor?

Image via Apple TV+

Yes! I was freaking out about it. My sister and I watched the show together, and we were just so happy to see you two together again, it was such a lovely reunion! But I will get to that in these questions — I’m so happy to talk to both of you. This show is phenomenal, a brilliant edge-of-your-seat mystery. What was it like having these two types of characters? Because I feel like this was nothing that you guys have ever portrayed before. What was the attraction behind those characters?

ANGOURIE RICE: For me, the thing that really intrigued me about Bailey is she’s so certain of who she is and what she wants, but her identity is tied to just one person, and that’s her dad. So when that disappears, she questions everything about who she is, everything about what she loves, and how she defines herself. It all goes away. I was really interested in exploring the journey of a girl who is in crisis mode and almost in this constant state of anxiety and fear of the unknown. That was really interesting to me. And to see it all happen in real-time, it feels so immediate and so urgent, and I was so excited to get into that headspace.

GARNER: This is a completely different energy that Hannah has than I do personally. I’m much more, I don’t know, Labrador Retriever in the middle of the dog park ready to just bounce around and say hi and chat [laughs]. And Hannah is quite taciturn as a person, actually. I mean, she’s deeply warm on the inside, but she’s not just wanting to be chatty with the person next to her in the grocery store. So just shifting my energy in that way was so interesting and something that hadn’t been asked of me, certainly for a long time. And I just wanted to even build on that in just small ways, changing my vocal registry, or whatever it was. I just kind of wanted to feel those differences all the way through.

Certainly as a mom, playing a stepmom of someone who isn’t thrilled to have you as their stepmom was something that really intrigued me and was hard for me to do. Even personally, I wanted to instantly be friends with Angourie, and instead when we were on screen together, we had to go through this slow, laborious process of building trust. But it certainly led to us building trust as people. So it was wonderful.

It was beautiful – you guys have great chemistry in this, I love it so much. It’s very organic, the way you build towards each other as that dynamic of mother-daughter sort of thing. Angourie, I loved your performance, I thought you were magnetic in this. You said it yourself, though: Bailey’s very complex, and she’s held a lot by her father. When he’s out of the picture, and she’s spiraling, how did you get into that mindset of somebody whose identity is crumbling around them?

RICE: It is hard to go into something and having never been through something like that because it is so specific and so distressing and traumatic. When we were talking about Bailey before we got into filming, there were so many things just going through her life story that we could pick out, and I could find something that resonated with me, or that had happened in my life… Some of our directors shared some stories. Josh Singer and Laura Dave… they also had stories. For Laura, what inspired her to write Bailey and to write this story, and also for Josh; just certain personal stories. I really found that if we broke down Bailey’s emotional journey and took away the context, all those emotions and feelings, we had all gone through similar things. So I found that I could get into it that way, just distilling it into specific moments rather than thinking about a whole specific thing that I needed to relate to, if that makes sense.

Image via Apple TV+

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense – and Jennifer, I know that you’re a mom and I couldn’t help but think that there are a lot of maternal instincts popping out in this performance, but Hannah is at a different stage in life than your own. When you’re filming these scenes with Angourie’s Bailey, how do you balance what was written for the character of Hannah with how much of Jen the mom is added to the role?

GARNER: That was tricky for me. Angourie really led me through that, honestly, because she had such a clear sense of where we were as a pair that I often found myself being reminded by her, “That’s right. We’re not there yet. Yeah. I’m trying to speed us into me taking care of you because that’s what I naturally wanted to do.” And it was Angourie who really held us to where we were as a team. She did that by, for example, not looking at me the entire first episode except for once in the car. Yeah, that worked. That was pretty telling.

I’m wondering, because you guys portrayed this great, solid family unit with Nikolaj, but then he leaves, so how did you end up building that relationship with him to make it look like you have chemistry? The way Angourie didn’t look at you, did he ghost you guys for a couple of days? How did you build that relationship together?

GARNER: Well, the relationship with Nikolaj is that you cannot not relate to Nikolaj. He is so wonderful as a guy and as an actor. He is such a brilliant actor – brilliant actor. We always loved when Nikolaj would come for a few days to be with us and then he would disappear again. But it was very clear to me that the center of the story was Bailey and Hannah.

Image via Apple TV

Let’s talk about that Victor Garber appearance! That was so much fun to see. What was that like for you, Jen, to reconnect with him? Because I do have to say, that as an Alias fan in grade 10, I did dress up as Sydney Bristow — the most empowering costume ever. But I just have to know, what was it like going back to that? Did the screen time spark something for you – like, an Alias reunion or something?

GARNER: I’m not in charge of an Alias reunion. You’d have to talk to JJ [Abrams] about that. Obviously, I would be in. But Victor, I talk to every Sunday, so it’s not like… He thinks he really is my dad [laughs]. It’s hardly that there’s any confusion about me talking to him. We have looked for ways to work together in the last 17 years. Josh came to me and spoke to me about it and I could not have been more excited. Really, the ease you have working with someone again that you know that well, that you love that much, and that you’ve been opposite that much is just a beautiful thing. It really makes me believe in repertory theater and just repertoires of actors or that idea of working together as a unit. And it makes me excited for someday getting to work with Angourie again in any capacity because I know we will slot in. I could read her thoughts and I can be surprised by it; I trust her with any emotion that might come up for me and I can’t wait for that to happen again for us.

Knowing that Laura Dave helped develop this for TV with Hello Sunshine and the fact that we’ve had shows that are based on books, but built out of the source material, where would you imagine Hannah and Bailey would be knowing what we saw in the ending? Would you want to have a Season 2? Because personally, I would.

RICE: For everything, I just look to Laura Dave, I mean, we had her on set every day, and any question I had, any wondering or inkling of what Bailey’s past was like or what her future might be, it just all goes to Laura Dave and I feel the same way now. It’s like I trust her completely. It’s her story. It’s her characters.

GARNER: Absolutely the same. If Laura had some crazy idea, great. But there are no talks for anything like that now.

The Last Thing He Told Me is now streaming on Apple TV+ with a two-episode drop and a new episode every Friday until May 19.