Los Angeles, July 10 (IANS) Hollywood actress Jennifer Garner, who plays Hollis, a celebrity chef in the show The Five Star Weekend, has spoken about how her decade-long friendship with co-star Timothy Olyphant made romance easy.
For Garner and Olyphant, the series was a long-awaited reunion.
“He and I first worked together on an indie in New York City in the ‘90s,” Garner told people.com ahead of the show’s premiere.
Their best-known collaboration is 2006’s Catch and Release.
Garner says she recently found out that the rom-com “has this whole life that I didn’t know it had, which has been very gratifying to learn.”
Working together on The Five Star Weekend “was great,” Garner says, as the “trust and history” they share made things easy.
“How fun to go in and just hit the ground running, knowing each other like we do.”
“With Tim, there was that trust there,” she said.
“I love his wife. I’ve known her forever.”
In fact, Garner, who is also an executive producer on the series, which is an adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s 2023 novel, was responsible for Olyphant’s casting to begin with and Hamilton’s.
“Jen, in particular, with her two men, Matthew and Jack, was really interested in working with some lovely guys that she had worked with before, that she had a connection with, so that’s how Josh and Tim came about,” showrunner Bekah Brunstetter said.
Brunstetter added: “We were so lucky to get both of them.”
Collaborating with Garner on the producing side was “really natural,” Brunstetter adds.
“She is so accessible and so warm, and there’s nothing about her that makes you feel like you can’t touch her.”
The romance was just one of the multitude of things that drew Garner to the story.
“There were so many draws to doing this show for me,” the actress says.
Among those was the chance to be “part of an ensemble of female actresses who all had beginnings, middles, and ends to complex storylines with so much grist for the mill between all of them.”
Hollis and her “stars,” as her friends are repeatedly referred to throughout the series, all have “histories that are complicated and misunderstood,” in the show, as Garner points out. Layered in the story, too, are themes of grief, motherhood, fame and, of course, romance, thanks to Mr. Olyphant.
Garner is already itching for a season 2 renewal.
“My biggest hope and wish is that we get to do a second season of this show so that we can go in knowing each other as well as we do now,” she says, referring to the bond the actresses formed during production. “We became very close very quickly.”
–IANS
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