Although she’s been an A-Lister in her own right for over two decades, actor Jennifer Garner has said that Hollywood women owe a ‘debt of gratitude’ to Reese Witherspoon.
It’s after she was cast in The Last Thing He Told Me - a TV series which was produced by the Sweet Home Alabama star’s company.
At the premiere of the new show, Garner gushed about how Witherspoon had encouraged her in front of and behind the camera.
Now streaming on Apple TV, the tense thriller centres around Hannah, a woman who is trying to figure out why her husband suddenly went missing.
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As The Last Thing He Told Me’s mystery deepens though, the married woman forms a close bond with her 16-year-old stepdaughter, Bailey, as they search for the truth.
Garner spoke about the new series, telling The Hollywood Reporter that she’d enjoyed Hannah's optimism in the face of adversity – something she deeply understood.
“Hannah and I are quite different but there was something about her that just really spoke to me. I feel like she is the ultimate hero of her own story,” the 50-year-old actress said, adding: “…she’s fighting for her own optimism and that is something that I could really relate to,”
Although the series centre around the disappearance of Owen, played by Games of Thrones Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, there is a surprising number of women involved in the series’ production as well as an all-female directorial team.
Having produced on Netflix’s Yes Day and the upcoming film Family Leave, Garner also gained her first exec producer role on the mini-series.
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She even admitted that she poured over scripts in the garden with co-writers Laura Dave and Josh Singer, prior to beginning filming.
“I think the older you get and the more you’ve been kicking around for 30 years, you naturally become more central to the collaborative process,” she explained.
However, the 13 Going On 30 star insisted that Witherspoon had inspired her to turn her hand to producing after the Legally Blonde star set up her own production company; Hello Sunshine.
“Honestly, Reese is behind that, she has really pushed me. She said to me a few years ago, ‘Nobody is sitting around thinking, what can I shoot in L.A. that’s going to have a 50-year-old woman in it?’ She’s like, ‘You’ve got to create your own stuff,'” Garner confessed, telling the magazine: “All women in this town owe a debt of gratitude to Reese.”
Topics: Film and TV, Celebrity