On the Today Show, actress Jennifer Garner and novelist Elin Hilderbrand present “The Five-Star Weekend”, the series adapted from the writer’s best-seller: the story of a woman who, at a pivotal moment in her life, invites five friends for a weekend on Nantucket Island.
Five Friends, Five Eras of One Life
The novel’s concept, now the series’, fits in one image: a woman who has just lost her husband gathers, for a dream weekend on Nantucket Island, her closest person from each phase of her life — the high-school friend, the college friend, the work friend, the mom-life friend. Women who have everything in common through her… and who don’t know each other at all. A story about grief, then, but above all about the women “who can pull you out of it” — and, between the lines, a question put to every viewer: who would you invite to your own five-star weekend?
A “Village of Women”
What drew Jennifer Garner to the role is exactly what fuels Elin Hilderbrand’s novels: the complexity of female friendship, those overlapping histories and old scores between friends collected across different eras of one life. The shoot, she says, exceeded her hopes: working closely with four other actresses — including the irresistible Regina Hall, “so funny, so much trouble” — turned the set into one long fit of giggles. Her conviction is simply put: “The only way you can do it all as a woman is if you are part of a village of women.” She has several of her own, she says, in her work life and her home life alike — her best friend was her publicist for years before becoming her manager.
Garner proved the point without meaning to: the day she filmed a fake television interview for the series — opposite a host playing herself — she was, in real life, in the middle of an investor roadshow for the IPO of her food company Once Upon a Farm, scheduled for the following week. “That morning I was talking household penetration and innovation with investors, at lunch I was on set, then back to investor after investor. Sometimes it’s that crazy — your brain is literally cleaving into two.”
Much More Than a “Beach Read”
Elin Hilderbrand, a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, looks back on her long-ambivalent relationship with the title Queen of the Beach Read — one she now wears with a smile, as her devoted readers, the “Hildabelles”, travel to her Nantucket weekends: “I always brought that literary background to my books. It’s not just frothy topics — we get heavy, deep and real alongside.” The series, she says, pulls off the same juxtaposition: beautiful to look at, aspirational, yet carried by real emotions — grief, deception, humour too. “Every character is fully realised,” Garner confirms, promising twists “every step of the way”.
“It Had to Be Nantucket”
A resident of the island for thirty years — “I got there and said: I’m never leaving” — Hilderbrand confides that having “Five-Star” shot on Nantucket was “probably the most wonderful thing other than the birth of my children”: “It is a singular place, you can’t imitate it. It couldn’t be Canada, it couldn’t be Georgia. It had to be Nantucket.” Some locals feared the disruption of the shoot; the novelist’s answer is that the series doubles as a guidebook to the island, filmed at its loveliest spots. Between takes the cast went sailing, sang karaoke and cold-plunged into the icy September ocean; Garner — a former chemistry major and self-confessed science kid — went back to the whaling museum three times so as not to miss a lecture. All eight episodes of the series are available on Peacock.