The co-star Jennifer Garner called a genius: “I think I love you”
There is a fair amount of acclaimed shows hidden away on Apple TV that folk are only just beginning to discover.
For sci-fi fans, there’s For All Mankind and the mighty Severance, comedy-wise, there’s Shrinking and Mythic Quest, and there are plenty of thrillers too, and while the Jennifer Garner-starring The Last Thing He Told Me is not all that acclaimed, enough people watched it to warrant a second season.
Featuring Garner and Game of Thrones’ Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, it’s one of those dark and broody ‘my husband has disappeared, what happened to him’ efforts that are usually (always) adapted from a best-selling book, this time one by an author called Laura Dave, who co-produces the show with her Oscar-winning screenwriter husband Josh Singer.
Garner signed up to lead the show after Julia Roberts dropped out, and the second season starts at the end of next month. It marks a continuation of a comeback of sorts for Garner, although she never really went away as such, but in the 2000s, she was undoubtedly one of the hottest properties on the planet thanks to JJ Abrams’ sci-fi hit Alias and the Marvel movies like Elektra.
She couldn’t do much wrong around that time, neatly straddling (not literally) the sweaty internet superhero fanboys and the female feel-good comedy aficionados thanks to the global bodyswap hit 13 Going on 30 in 2004. Throw in a celebrity marriage to a pre-going-on-yachts-with-J-Lo Ben Affleck, and you had a recipe for megastardom. But 2005’s Daredevil spin-off Elektra didn’t go down anywhere near as well as hoped, and the following year she made a romantic comedy that fared even worse.
Catch and Release probably shouldn’t have bombed; it had some big names involved, Kevin Smith was riding high on the success of his late-1990s movies, Timothy Olyphant was becoming a star thanks to HBO’s Deadwood, and Juliette Lewis was still a cool presence. And it was she that Garner remembers best from filming the 2006 movie, which was directed by Erin Brockovich writer Susannah Grant.
Garner recalled: “I have to say I think my favorite, well, Kevin Smith is so great, but my other favorite, favorite thing about the movie was Juliette Lewis who I think is… is she a genius or what? She is so funny”.
Adding, “And the first day of rehearsals she came in and she was like, ‘I can’t do this. This doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t think I should be doing this, I can’t do this’. And then she would start to talk, and I would just be like, ‘Oh, here she is and I think I love you.’”
Despite Garner and Lewis getting on famously, the film bombed massively on release, bringing in just $16million from a budget of almost $30m and sparked pretty fallow periods for both the actors; Lewis focusing on music for a bit and Garner on her family. But both of them have used TV in recent years to forge steady career comebacks, Garner with the sitcom Party Down and Lewis appearing in a number of shows, including the teen horror Yellowjackets, plus the Queer as Folk reboot and the spooky Facebook-made Sacred Lies.
Garner, meanwhile, has plenty to keep her busy now that The Last Thing He Told Me has wrapped; she’s heading back to her sci-fi roots in Zygote, about a hostage negotiator in space, plus she’s starring in another TV show, this time one called The Five-Star Weekend about a food influencer having something of a personal crisis.
