‘The Last Thing He Told Me’ creators Laura Dave and Josh Singer on adapting novel and Jennifer Garner’s ‘career-best work’ [Exclusive Video interview]

Denton Davidson
·4 min read
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“When I started writing the book I thought I was writing one kind of love story — a love story between Hannah and her husband who goes missing,” says Laura Dave, the best-selling author of “The Last Thing He Told Me,” which she has adapted into an Apple TV+ series with her husband, Oscar winner Josh Singer. “What I realized several years into the writing…was I was telling a different kind of love story. I was telling a love story of Hannah and her new stepdaughter. We wanted to honor that story in the series.” Watch our interview with Dave and Singer above.

“The Last Thing He Told Me” stars Emmy nominee Jennifer Garner as a woman who forms an unexpected relationship with her 16-year-old stepdaughter (Angourie Rice) while searching for the truth about why her husband (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) has mysteriously disappeared. The seven-episode series begins streaming April 14 on Apple TV+.

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SEE Jennifer Garner looks for answers in Apple’s ‘The Last Thing He Told Me’ trailer [Watch]

Singer, who won an Academy Award for his “Spotlight” original screenplay in 2016, had originally planned to adapt his wife’s book into a film. “Hello Sunshine (Reese Witherspoon‘s production company) came to us and they essentially said, ‘No, we think this is a six-to-seven episode limited.’ And Laura and I sat down one night right after we heard that..and we sort of walked through the book. We realized cramming this into a movie was going to be really challenging. There’s just so much story, and moreover, there’s an ability to expand a little bit if you do it as a limited.”

“I was hired into this industry by John Wells, who gave me my break writing for ‘The West Wing,'” Singer continues. “I literally would ask myself on a regular basis, ‘What would John do?’ With that sort of compass, in terms of how to make a television show, and with the real compass next to me (Dave), it was smoother than I thought it would have been.”

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For Dave, it was a relief to allow other writers to join the fold while creating this series. “The novel had so many iterations,” she explains. “What defines this novel for me is as much what I threw out as what I kept. All along I was killing my darlings, for years and years. Some of the things I thought I could never let go, like the original ending I had for the first four years I was working on it — I was holding onto that ending so tight you would think my life depended on it. And I let that go. So by the time it came to adapting it, I was like, ‘Please God! Other people, come on in! Let’s get in the water.’ I think that is the only attitude if you’re making a TV show. I feel very lucky to have our collaborators. We could not have had a better number one in Jen Garner, who cared so deeply about every word and every page.”

“Jen’s a wonderful actor and I think she’s done career-best work here,” Singer adds. “Which is saying something, given the career she’s had. But she’s also a wonderful collaborator. We had wonderful collaborators across the board. Our actors, our producing partners, our directors. It really was a team effort.”

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