{"id":32103,"date":"2023-04-14T15:43:59","date_gmt":"2023-04-14T13:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiotimes.com\/?p=1816237"},"modified":"2023-04-15T04:59:53","modified_gmt":"2023-04-15T02:59:53","slug":"is-the-last-thing-he-told-me-based-on-a-true-story-laura-dave-explains","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/rss_feed\/is-the-last-thing-he-told-me-based-on-a-true-story-laura-dave-explains\/","title":{"rendered":"Is The Last Thing He Told Me based on a true story? Laura Dave explains"},"content":{"rendered":"

The author and showrunner unpacks parallels with real-world cases. <\/p>

By David Craig\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Friday, 14 April 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>

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The Last Thing He Told Me tells an emotional story of a mother and her stepdaughter working together after they are abandoned in the midst of an earth-shattering corporate scandal.<\/p>\n

Hannah (Jennifer Garner) had struggled to bond with Bailey (Angourie Rice) after marrying her father Owen (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), but this traumatic turn of events leaves them little choice but to support one another.<\/p>\n

The series is based on a novel of the same name, which climbed to the top of the charts after being featured in Reese Witherspoon\u2019s popular online book club.<\/p>\n

While The Last Thing He Told Me is not directly based on a true story, it does have very deliberate parallels with real-world cases of corporate fraud, as explained by author and co-showrunner Laura Dave in an exclusive interview with RadioTimes.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Last Thing He Told Me true story<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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Angourie Rice and Jennifer Garner in The Last Thing He Told Me.<\/span><\/figcaption> Apple TV+<\/i><\/span><\/div>\n

Previously, Laura Dave has discussed that her primary inspiration for The Last Thing He Told Me was the Enron scandal, in which a US-based energy company was found to have \u2018hidden\u2019 billions of dollars in debt.<\/p>\n

The highly publicised saga led to the company declaring bankruptcy, its accountancy firm being dissolved, and new regulations and legislation being introduced to improve the accuracy of financial reporting by public companies.<\/p>\n

Speaking to\u00a0Variety<\/a>\u00a0in 2021, Dave said: \u201cI saw an interview back then with Linda Lay, the wife of Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, in which she said, \u2018My husband\u2019s done nothing wrong. He\u2019s not guilty.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cI had no idea if she believed that or not. I started thinking of a woman who found herself newly married to someone that the world is telling her is so paradoxical to her understanding of who her partner is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost two decades later, another shocking corporate scandal struck when healthcare company Theranos \u2013 which claimed to have revolutionary new blood testing technology \u2013 was also revealed to be fraudulent.<\/p>

Speaking exclusive to RadioTimes.com<\/strong>, Dave said: \u201cI think that what those two cases really have in common, and it\u2019s one of the things that was really interesting to me about it, is the idea of hubris.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd there\u2019s so much hubris involved with thinking you can get away with embezzlement, with fraud on such a grand scale\u2026 What is the story someone is telling himself \u2013 or in the case of Theranos, herself \u2013 that allows that narrative to go on to the point where there\u2019s so much collateral damage?\u201d<\/p>\n

She continued: \u201cI\u2019m actually not surprised that it still goes on because, at our very base, it\u2019s storytelling. You\u2019re either going to invest your life in creating a story that is for the good or \u2013 without being binary about it \u2013 is for less than good.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd so you\u2019ve got to be really, really careful about what narrative you\u2019re diving into. And in the case of Theranos or Madoff or all the way back to Enron, the common denominator is that people get so invested in a story \u2013 their own personal story, their own personal narcissism \u2013 that they lose the thread.\u201d<\/p>