Courtesy of Michael Becker/Apple TV SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains major spoilers from “Souvenirs d’enfance,” the Season 2 finale of “The Last Thing He Told Me,” now streaming on Apple TV.
Jennifer Garner and Judy Greer seem destined to play frenemies for the rest of their lives. Nearly 22 years after co-starring in “13 Going on 30” — the beloved fantasy rom-com in which Garner’s body-swapped protagonist Jenna Rink locks horns with Greer’s Lucy Wyman, her childhood friend-turned-rival — the real-life best friends have reunited on screen as antagonists in the Apple TV thriller “The Last Thing He Told Me.”
“‘13 Going on 30’ is a gift forever and ever in our lives,” Garner tells Variety during a joint video call with Greer. “Gary Wenick, our angel director, gave us that gift. He and the writers and the producers all created something that let us play off each other in this super fun, frenemy way that I think will chase us forever, and we’re so happy and lucky for that. But I just know I’m better when I work opposite Judy, so I’ll always look for that chance.”
Originally billed as a limited series based on Laura Dave’s novel of the same name, the first season of “The Last Thing He Told Me” starred Garner as Hannah Hall, a woman who must overcome a difficult relationship with her teen stepdaughter, Bailey (Angourie Rice), to investigate the sudden disappearance of her husband, Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau). By the end of those seven episodes, Hannah learned that, after Owen’s tech start-up was implicated in a fraud scandal, her husband disappeared to avoid exposing his true identity and to stop Bailey from being targeted by her own grandfather, Nicholas (David Morse), a lawyer for the same crime syndicate that Owen was trying to expose. Hannah eventually negotiated a deal with Nicholas to keep her and Bailey safe, forcing Owen to remain away from his family.
But, naturally, successful limited series tend to find ways to continue. The second season, based on Dave’s recently published sequel “The First Time I Saw Him,” picks up the story five years later, when Hannah crosses paths with an unrecognizable Owen at her art show. Since going into hiding, Owen has lived under another alias to gather intel about the Campano crime family — patriarch Frank (John Noble); his hot-headed heir apparent son Teddy (Luke Kirby); and his daughter Quinn Favreau (Greer), who insists that she wants nothing to do with the family business.
Courtesy of Apple TV After a tense reunion at Hannah’s estranged mother’s (Rita Wilson) house, Hannah, Owen and Bailey work together to get Nicholas to flip on the Campanos and to gather enough evidence to take down the entire organization. Their efforts lead them in the season’s last two episodes to Paris, where Frank was planning to celebrate his 80th birthday with his children — only for him to be gunned down in a hotel lobby by an assassin who had been sent to kill Teddy for a deal gone wrong.
For most of the season, Hannah and Owen have suspected that Quinn, who runs a financial firm stateside, is the real brains to the Campano organization, not Teddy. Bailey, on the other hand, had a harder time believing that Quinn is involved, largely because Quinn was the best friend of her late mother, Kate. But in the finale, after piecing together her memories with the help of Hannah, Bailey realizes that Quinn was pushing her on a playground swing the day that Kate was killed nearby in a hit-and-run.
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