“Can we ever really know the people we love the most?”

That’s the question at the center of The Last Thing He Told Me, the upcoming Apple TV+ series based on novelist Laura Dave’s thriller of the same name. Debuting with two episodes on April 14 on the streamer—the season’s other five installments will be added weekly on Fridays—the show follows Hannah (Jennifer Garner), a newlywed 40-something who’s still finding her footing in a new town and with her new family, when her world is turned upside down. 

Hannah and her 16-year-old stepdaughter, Bailey (Angourie Rice), are given two halves of the same cryptic note when Hannah’s husband Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) disappears. Hannah’s simply reads, “protect her.” Bailey’s is wordier but no less cryptic—and accompanied by a duffel bag full of cash. When reports of the tech company Owen helps run make headlines for alleged embezzlement and fraud, Hannah and Bailey have only each other to try and untangle the mystery as they realize that the man they thought they knew may not exist at all. 

The show is being produced by Lauren Neustadter and Reese Witherspoon for Hello Sunshine production company, and the novel was a Reese’s Book Club selection, which is how Garner originally found it. “I devoured the book,” she tells Vanity Fair, adding that she actually read it out loud to one of her three kids. “We were so compelled to keep reading and bedtime was just flying out the window every single night because it was just one more chapter, one more chapter, one more chapter.” 

Then Garner heard that Julia Roberts, who was originally attached to the project, had dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. “I just went on, like, a letter-writing campaign, I guess," she says. “I felt such a connection to the character, even though I’ve been a mom for a minute, I can really understand looking at the world of teenagers and feeling like, Okay, what is the path forward? What am I supposed to do? Just feeling unsure of your place in the landscape.” The Bailey character has no time for Hannah—she considers her an intruder in the world she’s built with her father—and drips with acidic disdain. Says Garner, “I am familiar with the look.”  

Dave, the novelist, adapted the book with her husband, Oscar-winning screenwriter Josh Singer (Spotlight), who is also the showrunner for the series. She started drafting the novel in 2012, when the collapse of Enron’s massive corporate fraud got her brain whirring. 

“I saw Kenneth Lay’s wife on Today and she was giving an interview in which she said, ‘my husband has done nothing wrong,’” Dave tells VF. “Setting aside whether I thought that was true or not, whether she thought that was true or not, I started to imagine a woman who found herself in that position, that the world was telling her that her husband was someone in direct contrast with whom she believed him to be. I only really wanted to tell that story if I could figure out a way to make her the hero of her own life, not the victim of it.” 

Enter Hannah, a woodturner (yes, Garner learned to turn wood for the role, and no, she wouldn’t say she’s great at it, but she does still have “a bowl that I accidentally went too deep inside and I accidentally got rid of the bottom, so really, it’s a tube” in her house) who desperately wants to be accepted by her husband’s daughter. It’s only when the duo loses the one thing linking them that they start to bond.

“I thought it was the love story of the two of them [Hannah and Owen],” Dave says. “It wasn’t until I had my son in 2016 when I realized, Oh, this is a love story, but not the love story I thought I was telling. It’s a story of someone becoming a mom. Once I sort of tapped into that, after many, many iterations, I figured out what Hannah’s journey really was.” 

Fittingly, with Garner’s screen pedigree, including the long-running spy thriller Alias and the hard-hitting Peppermint, Hannah’s journey involves high-stakes chases, shady figures, and deeply guarded secrets. Though she’s been playing in more family-friendly waters in recent years, Garner found it easy to slip back into action mode, to the point where a director would have to remind her that Hannah isn’t actually a pro at the whole espionage thing.

“He would say, Okay, she doesn’t know what she’s doing,” she says, laughingly, of reminders from showrunner Singer during action sequences. “Because I would just naturally—I can really skulk down a hallway, you know, really slip into a door. He’d be like, ‘just remember she doesn’t know what she’s doing. Right?’ ‘Right, right.’” 

But this found-family tale isn’t just a thriller, and it’s not only a mother-daughter story. Think of it as Stepmom meets Gone Girl, but also nothing like either of those movies, really. It’s a conundrum that catapulted the source novel to accolades and the top of the bestseller list, a story that Dave says “really lives across these genres.” She adds, “Sometimes your heart has to kind of break open for you to get to the place that you didn’t know you were meant to be, which is, I think, where this thriller ultimately goes.” 

As for Garner, she just hopes to capture what got her hooked as a booklover in the first place. “As Laura Dave’s number one fan, I just want people who love the book to feel satisfied with what I’ve done—what we’ve done—and to feel compelled to keep watching in the same way that I was driven to read,” Garner says. “Chapter, after chapter, after chapter.”