'The Last Thing He Told Me': Jennifer Garner, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau explore untrustworthy memories in thriller series

Alias fans will be happy to see Jennifer Garner on the small screen in the Apple TV+ series The Last Thing He Told Me (premiering April 14), an anxiety-inducing mystery-thriller based on the novel by Laura Dave.

Produced by Reese Witherspoon's company Hello Sunshine, the miniseries is strongly rooted in the concept of love and motherhood.

In The Last Thing He Told Me, Hannah (Garner) is living a seemingly happy life with her husband of just over a year, Owen, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau. The one tension point is that Hannah is not particularly popular with Owen's teenager daughter Bailey, played by Angourie Rice.

One day everything changes. Hannah receives a note from her husband that just reads "protect her," and Bailey is left a bag of money in her school locker, also with a note that reads, "I’m sorry I can’t help this make sense. You know what matters about me. And what matters about yourself. You are my whole life."

Hannah finds out that the CEO of the startup software company Owen works for, The Shop, is facing criminal charges. Similar to the Enron case, whenever someone expressed interest in The Shop's product, it went down in the company books as a sale, driving up the stock price ahead of an IPO. Now stockholders stand to lose half a billion dollars.

While that news is shocking for Hannah, what's more concerning is that Owen is not answering her calls. She has no idea where he is or what made him run, but is repeatedly being questioned by Grady (Augusto Aguilera), claiming to be a U.S. Marshal who needs to find Owen, who also warns Hannah that she doesn't know everything about her husband. That's when Hannah and Bailey take matters into their own hands to find out where Owen is, particular as Bailey claims, "my dad and I don't have secrets."

“It was just thrilling,” Coster-Waldau told Yahoo Canada about what attracted him to this project. “I was very curious to see where it was going and how it would unfold.”

“It was just an interesting structure and conceit in a way. … It's a mystery, thriller, what happened, who is this guy, and then really at the core it's a love story between a stepmother and her daughter. I thought that was very moving and it worked really well.”

While the actor is largely known for the long-running HBO hit Game of Thrones, Coster-Waldau actually likes working in this miniseries space, particularly because he admits he couldn't commit to watching a lengthy series like Game of Thrones right now.

“I like the miniseries,” he said. “I like to get an ending.”

“I wouldn't be able to start Game of Thrones now. Just the idea of 70 episodes, no I can't watch that. It's too much. But of course having lived it, it's a different thing. But I love the seven hours or 10 hours , or one story, you really dive into it and it's going to take you down different alleys. There is a flow."

'Meeting someone for the first time, just having to smell them was a first for both of us'

Much of the narrative relies on the audience believing that there has been real love between Hannah and Owen. Despite Garner and Coster-Waldau not knowing each other before they began the series, they were able to create that connection for these characters.

“We have to cover a lot of ground in a short amount of time because we had to believe that this couple are deeply in love, that they're 100 per cent committed to each other," Coster-Waldau said. "As an audience, you want to root for these two."

"The funny thing was the first time we met, ... it was almost like going back to drama school, [we had to do] a movement exercise to kind of meet. The director had this idea, she had done it in another show, and you kind of go, this is madness but all right, it will be fun. It was so much fun. Meeting someone for the first time, just having to smell them was a first for both of us. ... On top of that, [Garner] was ridiculously prepared. She loved the book, she knew everything about it, she was beyond committed. So that was very inspiring.”

As the series progresses, something that initially looks like a love story between this couple unexpectedly torn apart, is really more about the evolution of this maternal relationship between Hannah and Bailey. For Coster-Waldau, a father himself, he was able to tap into his personal life to execute the role.

“I have daughters the same age and so that was incredibly helpful,” Coster-Waldau said. “You always use yourself, I mean that's all you have.”

“My circumstances are vastly different from Owen, but humans are humans. I think overall, we share much more than what separates us. You then, of course, use your imagination. Could I imagine myself living a life with that much secrecy and kind of erase part of my past? I can't imagine doing it to that extent. … But also, just as in your own daily life, you might conceal parts of your personality in certain situations, and then you'll let that part of your personality come out in other situations.”

'Is it possible to erase memory?'

The Last Thing He Told Me, particularly the relationship between Owen and Hannah, is a story largely crafted from memories. The complicated and emotional aspect of that is our memories can't always be trusted, which makes this search for the truth more difficult.

“I find memory incredibly fascinating because … you can't really trust it, and not even your own,” Coster-Waldau said. “I've been in all these discussions with my wife, with my daughters like, Do you remember that thing that happened? You're like, no, that didn't happen. ... But it's so clear in my mind that, that was what happened."

“There was a scene where I was like, God he's so sweet in the scene, what's going on? And then of course, it's like oh yeah, this is because she's remembering that moment when she met him and she was just so in love. … I found that interesting, navigating between one version of the truth, if you will, and that's, in a way, the core of that characters is just memory. Is it possible to erase memory? Can you restart your life ... and can you be a truthful, honest caring person?"