Husband And Wife Creators Explore Levels Of Trust In New Series ‘The Last Thing He Told Me’

A global financial crisis inspired Laura Dave to write about a woman who finds herself in the middle of a mystery, one she can only solve with the help of an unlikely confidante.

Based on the New York Times
NYT
Bestseller, The Last Thing He Told Me is the journey of a woman who teams up with the stepdaughter she barely knows to uncover the truth about her husband’s sudden disappearance.

Jennifer Garner plays lead character Hannah, with Angourie Rice as her stepdaughter, Bailey.

“I was really interested in the Enron crisis,” explains Dave. “I watched Linda Lay, Kenneth Lay’s wife, [say] that she believed her husband to be innocent. And I thought, ‘well, putting aside whether he is or isn’t, what about a woman who believes that about her husband, who believes that the world is telling her one thing and yet she knows in her soul who she has married and who she is with?’”

It was that dichotomy that inspired Dave to create a character who she feels is not a victim, but a hero.

Dave says that the character does this by working through thoughts of ‘I know who he is even if the world is telling me something else,’ and that Hannah’s also driven to become a hero of her stepdaughter’s life and find both of them a way to something better.

Explaining that she started writing the novel in 2012, Dave says that at that time she didn’t have any sort of screen adaptation in mind.

She admits that, “I really was thinking — I never know the ending when I start writing. So, it started for me with the question of, ‘can we ever know the people we love and what does it mean to know the person you love the most?’ And so, that was sort of the journey of the book.”

One of the benefits of bringing her work to the screen was that Dave got to work with her husband, Josh Singer, who, along with Dave is a co-creator and executive producer on the series.

“The journey of the show was a really blessed one for me because it was my first time getting to work with my favorite writer, who happens to be my husband,” she says.

However, she can’t exactly recommend their collaboration process, saying, “I wouldn’t necessarily recommend writing a show with your partner in the middle of a pandemic with no childcare. There was a lot of 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. shifts.”

Singer says that he’s always wanted to take one of Dave’s books and work with her to ‘get at not only the fun and the excitement and the propulsion and the drive, but also get that nuance and wisdom across.’

It’s Garner who then expands on the mystery at the core of the story, saying it’s ‘fascinating’ because, “in the disappearance there’s so many misdirects that it unfolds slowly because [Hannah] doesn’t know why he’s disappeared, where he’s disappeared to, if it’s temporary. So, her panic isn’t all of a sudden – it builds over time.”

Dave adds, “What we were really interested in with the idea of the disappearance is that ultimately the world is going to tell you something about why that person has left versus what you, as the people closest to him, knows about him and believe about why he has left. Living in that paradox is where this mystery is going to unfold and where Hannah and Bailey are going to figure out how they get themselves to a better place with or without him because they don’t know if he’s ever coming back.”

It’s Singer who then points out that that with Garner and Rice in the lead roles there’s, “this incredible relationship. It just blooms on the screen in a way we could only have dreamed off.”

Lauren Neustadter, who is an executive producer on the series, remarks, “The relationship between Hannah and Bailey is ultimately the heartbeat of the piece. The relationship between those two women feels like something I’ve never seen on television before, so I think it’s something audiences will really gravitate toward.”

‘The Last Thing He Told Me’ is available for streaming now on Apple TV+