First Look: Jennifer Garner Is Back in Action with ‘The Last Thing He Told Me’

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 the directors 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.”